Solana's President Says Crypto Gaming Is Dead

Crypto gaming has had a rough few years, but few people expected the president of the Solana Foundation to be the one to write the eulogy. Lily Liu posted on Friday that 'gaming on a blockchain is not coming back' — a blunt declaration that landed hard inside a community that once looked to Solana as the blockchain most capable of making gaming viable at scale. The timing was pointed: Liu's post came just days after a Polymarket discussion went wide about Meta walking away from its metaverse bet, and she drew a direct line between the two.

Why Did Lily Liu Call Time on Blockchain Gaming?

Liu's post wasn't entirely out of nowhere. It followed a Polymarket discussion circulating earlier in the week about Mark Zuckerberg and Meta pulling back from the metaverse — a project the company had poured roughly $80 billion into before results proved underwhelming, to put it generously. For Liu, Meta's stumble was confirmation of something she apparently already believed: that the dream of persistent, blockchain-powered virtual worlds had run its course.

Meta's metaverse never had an explicit crypto component. Zuckerberg famously rebranded his entire company to chase that vision, but he kept the blockchain at arm's length. The connection Liu drew was more conceptual — both Meta's metaverse and crypto gaming were built on the same foundational premise that users would increasingly live, work, and play in digital environments. That thesis collapsed for both, in different ways and on different timelines, but with the same outcome.

For what it's worth, Solana was supposed to be the chain that made crypto gaming technically possible where Bitcoin and Ethereum couldn't. Transaction costs on those networks were simply too high for real-time gameplay interactions. Solana's speed and low fees were a genuine technical differentiator — it just turned out that technical feasibility wasn't the actual bottleneck. The problem was never the infrastructure. It was the games themselves.

Also, gaming on a blockchain is not coming back.

The GameFi Collapse Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Here's the part that stings if you backed crypto gaming at any point in the last four years: by most honest metrics, the sector never delivered. The 2021 bull run produced genuine mania around play-to-earn. Axie Infinity became a global phenomenon — players in Southeast Asia were reportedly earning more from the game than their day jobs. Venture capital followed the hype in size. a16z, Framework Ventures, and Animoca Brands collectively committed billions into the thesis, betting that tokens plus gaming equaled the future of entertainment.

Then the tokens collapsed. Axie's AXS cratered. The entire crypto gaming market cap shriveled from its peak as it became obvious that play-to-earn was less a gaming breakthrough and more an elaborate referral scheme requiring a constant stream of new entrants to sustain token prices. When user growth stalled, the economics unraveled almost immediately. The games hadn't gotten better. The tokens had just gotten cheaper.

Critics had been making this argument for years — that blockchain gaming was confusing financial incentives for genuine fun. Nobody keeps playing a game because there's a token attached to it. They keep playing because the game is actually good, because the world is compelling, because other people they care about are there too. On those measures, most web3 titles came up empty. The playbook for crypto gaming was essentially: launch a token, pay people to play, hope the community sticks around after the rewards dry up. It didn't work.

Solana Built Its Identity on Gaming — So Why the Retreat?

The irony in Liu's post is impossible to ignore. Star Atlas, one of the most ambitious blockchain gaming projects ever publicly announced, was built on Solana. Stepn, the fitness-meets-crypto app that had genuine early traction and real user growth, also ran on Solana. The foundation Liu leads spent years positioning its chain as the natural home for web3 gaming — the network with the technical specs developers actually needed: fast finality, cheap transactions, enough throughput to handle real-time in-game interactions without users noticing fees at all.

So when the president of that same foundation declares the whole category dead on a Friday afternoon, you have to ask: is this a genuine strategic reassessment, or is this damage control? Solana's gaming ecosystem has contracted considerably since the peak of 2022. Rather than defend it, Liu appears to be getting ahead of the narrative — writing off the category before anyone can write off the chain.

That's not necessarily the wrong call — sometimes the honest move is to admit a thesis failed and reallocate attention toward what's actually working. But it does leave the teams still building on Solana in an awkward position. They woke up on a Friday to find their platform's most prominent figurehead had publicly disowned their entire vertical.

Not everyone agreed with Liu's framing. X user @Tee9ee, a self-described video game designer, pushed back in terms that were both charitable and pointed — separating the garbage from the genuine and asking Liu to do the same.

If by gaming you mean play2earn 'games' with nothing to show off behind scam tokens, they should never come back. However, vague posts like this without careful phrasing don't sit right with gaming teams and communities. Solana is a great place for everyone to build on.

The Companies That Didn't Get the Memo

Not everyone is ready to file the sector's death certificate. Mythical Games is still shipping. Its mobile titles built around FIFA and Pudgy Penguins branding are live and actively marketed, and CEO John Linden has been notably candid about the evolution of his company's relationship with blockchain technology over the years — an evolution that involved shedding some significant assumptions along the way.

Linden said as far back as 2024 that what he once thought was the secret sauce — the blockchain layer itself — turned out not to be. The game, the experience, the world you build: that's what players respond to. The blockchain, if it's there at all, should be invisible infrastructure. Mythical isn't abandoning web3; it's quietly making the blockchain optional, which is maybe the most mature thing any company in this space has done.

Gunzilla Games took a nearly identical approach with its shooter Off the Grid. The GUNZ blockchain underpins the game's NFT items and token mechanics, but the game explicitly doesn't require any of that engagement. You can play the free-to-play battle royale without ever touching a wallet, buying a token, or knowing what an NFT is. The game doesn't withhold content as leverage to force crypto participation. That distinction — optional blockchain, not mandatory — is small in language but massive in design philosophy.

These companies represent a quieter evolution happening inside the sector — a pivot away from tokenomics-first design toward games-first design with blockchain as an optional layer. Less exciting on a pitch deck, but considerably closer to something users will actually tolerate long-term. Lily Liu may be entirely right that the original vision of crypto gaming is finished. The question nobody's asking yet is whether this stripped-back, optional-chain version counts as a continuation of the thesis, or as proof that the critics were right from the start.

In 2018 and 2019, I really thought the blockchain was going to be the secret sauce. We felt it was something we had to control; we had to own. But I think what we're seeing now is it's not really the secret sauce. The secret sauce is what you do on top of it.