Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu Calls Out "Stop Wasting Time on Crypto," Is the Crypto Industry Truly Dead?

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

OpenClaw, an open-source project founded by Peter Steinberger, responded yesterday on X to a user question, “What advice do you have for young people in their 20s?” His reply was just one sentence: “don’t waste time with crypto.” This tweet was then reposted by Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation, who also posted an identical message at the same time.

Together, the two tweets received over a million views, and the comment section quickly filled with skepticism. Is Lily Liu pushing back against sarcasm? Or does this signal that the crypto industry is heading toward extinction?

Steinberger’s Disdain for the Industry Is Justified; What About Lily?

OpenClaw’s predecessor underwent two name changes—from Clawdbot to Moltbot—and officially launched as OpenClaw on January 30 of this year. The project has now garnered over 200,000 stars on GitHub, making it a rare phenomenon in the open-source community in recent times.

After the project gained popularity, it was flooded with noise unrelated to technical development. Speculators rushed into the community to push for token issuance, attempting to leverage the project’s hype for pump-and-dump schemes. As a result, Steinberger is extremely hostile toward the crypto industry; he even implemented a complete ban on Discord, where any mention of “crypto” or “bitcoin” would be immediately banned—regardless of whether it was promotion, spam, or technical discussion.

According to CoinDesk, the ban was triggered in January when the project, then named Clawdbot, decided to change its name due to a trademark warning from Anthropic. During the brief window when the old GitHub/X accounts were transferred to new ones, someone hijacked the accounts and quickly launched a fake $CLAWD token on Solana.

The fake coin’s market cap soared to $16 million within hours, but after Steinberger publicly denied it, the value plummeted over 90%, leaving latecomers with huge losses. He was subsequently harassed by victims, prompting him to publicly state: “Please stop harassing me in the crypto space. I will never issue tokens. Anyone claiming I hold tokens is a scammer!”

In this context, his remark about not wasting time with crypto was a direct response to ongoing harassment, with a clear message. It was not a blanket rejection of cryptocurrencies as a technology or asset class.

Lily’s situation is entirely different. Faced with intense market attention on Steinberger’s original post, she chose not only to retweet but also to reiterate the same sentence herself. Public interpretation generally falls into two categories: one, that this signals a pessimistic view of the industry’s current state; two, that it’s a sarcastic remark pointing to specific behavioral patterns within the crypto industry rather than the industry as a whole.

Regardless of Lily’s true intent, her statement has triggered mostly negative reactions in the market. Several industry insiders publicly criticized her, saying that such an act is clearly inconsistent with her role and identity. “As the foundation chair, it’s like telling holders that what they’re betting on isn’t worth it. Whether it’s a joke or not, this signal is pretty bad.”

However, it must be acknowledged that in the current industry narrative, projects that rapidly issue tokens, create short-term wealth effects, and lack substantive technological development have long been a core concern. This long-term ecological overextension has accelerated the departure of capital and talent, and the emerging alternative for these resources is AI.

Capital and Talent Are Leaving En masse—Where Is the Crypto Industry Heading?

Renowned investor Stanley Druckenmiller mentioned in an interview with Morgan Stanley that the interest of the younger generation is shifting from cryptocurrencies to artificial intelligence.

This aligns with current industry trends: a large number of technical talents and early-stage venture capital are moving toward AI, while the hype around crypto has cooled to a low point.

Careful thought reveals that the AI industry is still in its early stages of infrastructure building and technological expansion—a cycle primarily characterized by value creation. The technological dividends have yet to be fully realized, the entrepreneurial window remains open, and early participants’ return expectations are relatively clear. The flow of young talent toward AI is a rational response to genuine opportunities, not a deliberate abandonment of cryptocurrencies.

Looking at history, the development of mobile internet followed a similar evolutionary path. In the later stages of value creation, when technological dividends become saturated and market competition intensifies, capital and attention tend to seek new outlets. The explosive growth of the crypto market in 2017 coincided with the maturity phase of mobile internet, which partly confirms that the cycle of value redistribution often begins when new asset classes absorb excess capital.

Whether AI will follow a similar path remains uncertain. But if we use this as a reference, the cycle of value redistribution will truly begin when homogeneous competition in AI drives down overall startup returns and market attention shifts away from AI. During that phase, the crypto market—characterized by low barriers to entry and high liquidity—will still be attractive to young people with limited capital, and short-term attention shifts won’t cause it to be permanently ignored.

For the crypto industry, every emerging industry’s maturation process inevitably involves this phase: loss of attention, valuation corrections, and the clearing out of speculative projects—all are parts of the industry cycle, not its end.

Booms and busts are normal. What truly matters is what remains after the downturn.