How Institutions Are Moving Onchain | Catherine Gu

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]You know, why Solana as opposed to other chains and we do a pretty good job to convince them why Solana.

[00:00:06]Um but, you know, it's not just like, why do you even need to build on blockchain in the first place, which I think is kind of the conversation I was having maybe 3 years, 4 years ago. So, that's a good sign. And hence, yeah, I think we're in that transition phase. I don't think this year or next year is the year, but, you know, I'll be very surprised if in 5 years' time we don't see things at scale and this time is really at scale, whether that's say on the retail side where a lot of the wholesale activities, I do think we're going to be having think doing things at scale. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

[00:00:58]>> [music] >> Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Lightspeed podcast.

[00:01:04]Today, I am lucky to be joined by Catherine Gu, uh head of product at Solana Foundation. Catherine, how you doing today?

[00:01:10]I'm doing great, Danny. Nice to meet you.

[00:01:12]Great to meet you and uh unfortunately, I I'm pretty sure I saw you at DAS last week. We didn't get a chance to chat, but um I know there were some great conversations going on. So many So many people there from around the industry, so didn't have time to chat with everyone, but I'm glad we could uh pull this together and and have a chat. Um anyway, cuz I know that there's a lot going on and uh it's exciting. Maybe given your given your background, which is maybe where we can start, um you know, over from from Visa working on uh payments and digital assets at at Visa coming to Solana. I guess I'm curious if you can talk through maybe your history um within sort of the crypto space and maybe how you ended up working on things at Visa and why and how you've maybe ended up making that shift from like maybe a web2 business to a web3 or like, you know, on-chain um kind of foundation working within the space.

[00:01:59]Yeah, for sure. Um and by the way, just kicking off like, I love DAS because I've been going like 3 years in a row now and uh I really enjoy and it's it's crazy just to see how things have changed and like everything is scaling with a lot of institutional people these days. It's very different.

[00:02:14]I think the first year you you guys were hosting in London and it was a uh much different kind of vibe I would say compared to this year. So, it's definitely going the right direction. Um I think for myself personally, um the the general kind of underlying theme is always around finance uh and economics, right? Like, my background has always been in finance. I started as a quant uh in the city of London working in a hedge fund.

[00:02:38]And uh I I think I have a lot of appreciation in terms of how traditional finance works, especially when it comes to a lot of the the hedge fund and global macroeconomic kind of side of things. Very familiar with that side. Um I think what really drove me to to crypto in general is just technology shift. Um you know, you're seeing so many things and it's not just like pertaining to crypto itself, but everything to do with AI and quantum and stuff. You're just seeing all the technologies changing in a very clear direction. And it just makes a lot of, you know, especially younger people who starting finance in around the the sort of the 2010s of the world to question if the the sort of the the norm will always be that way or whether there's a new chance to rewrite history. And for me, I think that's really what it means to be as part of the the crypto ecosystem because ultimately, it is about finance, right? And whether we like to admit it or not, it's it is about replicating the existing infrastructure in many different ways. But we have a chance for the first time to just define what it should be uh and how to improve it in a way that maybe traditionally, because of legacy system and stuff, it's just too much cost to do so.

[00:03:45]>> [snorts] >> So, my I would say my foray into crypto started as a student when I uh did another master's degree uh when I was at Stanford University, took classes in CS classes with Professor Dan Boneh and Professor Tim Roughgarden, who are both like uh leading voices, I would say, in a lot of the crypto academia world. Um really inspired because to me, it was really fascinating as is about the incentive mechanism design. It's a very interesting problem if you think about it that blockchain is about uh censorship resistant. It's about trustless system, but how do you in in incentivize people to act like different actors, whether good actor or bad actor, but to incentivize them to all act in a way that is good for the ecosystem as a whole? So, that comes back to the incentive mechanism design and that really fascinated me. Uh so, anyway, like I spent a lot of time in around protocols, you know, wrote white paper, and I interned at Anchorage and Gauntlet um as I was exploring this entire industry. I think when I was looking for like a full-time after graduating from Stanford, what really drew me to Visa crypto is it is after all a payments company, right? And like, me personally, I don't know anything about payments prior to this. Like, I know about finance, but once you enter Visa, you truly start to really think about how money moves. And that's more like on a meta level. It doesn't need to be like crypto or anything. Just think about how money moves from one entity to another.

[00:05:07]That flow of fund is fascinating. And then, when you apply new technology uh such as blockchain on top of that, you start to kind of start to be able to re-architecture a lot of, you know, existing designs and that becomes a really interesting problem to solve. So, yeah, the last 5 and 1/2 years uh at Visa uh really opened my horizon from many different ways cuz I think contrary to many other people who started crypto in a more DeFi native ways, I never really spent a lot of time on NFT or metaverse to be to be fully honest. Um I started my journey in CBDC, which is probably a very unpopular uh topic at this moment in time, but you know, going back to 2020, I would say uh CBDC actually has a very strong reason why it happened, right? We know that stablecoin was starting.

[00:05:54]There's the whole challenge to sovereignty and hence, central banks, of course, they have a they have a say, they have a stake in all of these. And still, even today, they want to figure out how to control the money supply and all of that. So, started the whole journey more from the extreme end of the top-down level of the government-centric view of how to think about money, the new version of money.

[00:06:14]And as things evolved more on a macro level because I would say at the very beginning, like central banks are more focused on the retail side of CBDC, but over time, it's very clear the shift goes back to wholesale and that fits the role of what central banks do today as well, which is very much a wholesale financial activities. But then they leave the rest of the ecosystem to private sectors. And this is where we're talking about tokenization. So, I really spent a lot of time uh going deep into tokenization, thinking about tokenized deposits, thinking about stablecoins, think about the role that that banks can do. Uh and with that in mind, I built a product at Visa uh called Visa tokenized uh asset platform.

[00:06:50]Uh I think it was launched in 2024 and it was in partnership with BBVA, who was using that platform to issue their euro stablecoin. Uh so, it was fascinating journey just from understanding how payments work as well as being a product person and to really build something from zero to one uh to fully appreciate it. I would say why I moved uh in 2026, I think throughout 2025, as you know, this whole craziness around stablecoins, like everything shifted, right? Thanks to GNUS Act. And I just felt really strongly that I definitely want to be in the epicenter of all of these things.

[00:07:25]And you know, it also helps to affirm my own belief that this is for real, right?

[00:07:30]Like, because you know, anyone who's gone through the the sort of the winter time, you sort of have a lot of doubts.

[00:07:36]Especially, it's not like the industry is not trying hard, but if regulations is always there as roadblocks, you know, it just can't get things done. But for the first time, we're seeing real regulatory clarity coming from the US, who really is charging the lead. And it gives a lot of faith in terms of, well, this time is for real. And this time, institutions are going to take the lead to actually start building ASAP on blockchain. So, for me personally, I want to be at the epicenter and Solana is the best place to be because it is the top like the fastest growing chain.

[00:08:06]It has the most liquidity right now and the team is super ambitious. Everyone's hungry. The team is super small uh compared to the size of the foundation itself.

[00:08:15]Um And I think everyone is here to win.

[00:08:17]And I think we're really trying to drive hard uh in terms of like use cases, right? It's it's not just about technology, but make it relevant, make it pragmatic for institutions to use.

[00:08:28]And hence, it go all goes back to use cases, how we can really help them to get real commercial uh production-ready uh stuff on-chain.

[00:08:36]Okay, great context. Um it maybe maybe as a comment, I I it's probably a good thing that you didn't get wrapped up in NFTs in the metaverse. Um we've seen how that's gone since. Um I will say maybe just as a follow-up on on, you know, why you've come to Solana, um there is a sentiment within the crypto space that I think maybe within like the sort of retailer consumer side of of the crypto space more recently, probably within the past year and a half, 2 years now of you know, institutions and all these TradFi businesses are, you know, coming on-chain. They're they're sort of, you know, maybe the word that people like to use is like co-opting the open-source technology and then they'll, you know, make a bunch of make a bunch of revenues kind of like at the expense of all the open-source builders who've been like toiling away for years, but um you're you're sort of going against the grain here by saying, "No, actually, my time at Visa was great, but I'd like to come on-chain instead."

[00:09:26]Is that just out of the I mean, you mentioned specifically like you think Solana might be an epicenter for that activity in the future. So, is that is that really just the core of it? You expect that, you know, maybe Visa will do great things in the future with, you know, on-chain and crypto-based products, but uh there there might be more value to accrue to a few specific places.

[00:09:46]Well, I mean, given Solana is a public permissionless infrastructure, how value get accrued to individual developers or different institutions, I think that's entirely down to the economics design of you know, all these different applications down the road. Um, but I think going back to your question, I think my move also is a translation of the overall um sort of evolution of Solana, if you will, because I mean Solana has a very clear focus on this notion of internet capital market and, you know, it's always been trying to be the the the NASDAQ the on-chain NASDAQ of the world.

[00:10:22]But as you know, like, you know, the it went through many different periods.

[00:10:25]There's the the the NFT, the meme coins and stuff like that. And now there's also very clear focus on the institutional side. And I think my sort of personal transition is sort of like a reflection of the the sort of transition phase that Solana is going through. To me, I mean, I think having financial institutions building on chain is inevitable. In fact, it's necessary, right? In terms of thinking about the ultimate success uh for blockchain. Uh I'm never a believer that blockchain is trying to kill the existing finance and just get something new. Like you can't. Like think about all the billions of people who rely on banking infrastructure today. You cannot kill all the banks and just create new ones because ultimately what does that even mean? You're just replicating the same thing. To me, it's more about onboarding the existing ones.

[00:11:10]It's a transitioning. Yes, some some transitioning might be more violent than others, but I think it is a matter of onboarding all of the existing tradfis.

[00:11:18]And of course, you can build new products uh beyond just what tradfi today can enable. But having that symbiosis, but also just understanding how the institutional really think about the world today and how you can persuade them to realize the full full full benefits of on-chain because it's not meant to be a zero-sum game. It's meant to be like win-win such that, you know, it's also in the interest of the the institution to think that in the long run, once they start to build on chain, they will realize much greater economic gains in the long run because blockchain brings all these new economic activities through say programmability and other things that you might not be able to achieve uh as of today.

[00:11:58]Yeah, I think that I think that makes sense. And maybe that can tee you up to ask and maybe you can lay out for the rest of the conversation like at a high level now being at the foundation, what are sort of like those major milestones or key areas or themes that you're focused on now head of product at at Solana Foundation. Um, where do you think, you know, you need to focus to support, enhance the capabilities or um use of the network and, you know, what are those sort of like target use cases or customers or niches that that you need to go after or support the community going [clears throat] after?

[00:12:33]Yeah. So, for my coverage, I focus very much on the digital asset side. And that's really split between, you know, everything on the payments leg and as well as everything on the financial institutions.

[00:12:43]Um, so from my vantage point, uh a lot of the focus here is really thinking about how to make Solana as infrastructure as easily accessible as possible uh for these financial institutions. Um, one of the product we just launched actually last week during DAS is this thing called Solana developer platform.

[00:13:05]So, Solana developer platform is really just all about APIs, right? It's everything that you as an institution might need in order to build on Solana.

[00:13:14]Um, so if you want to say issue a tokenized deposits, if you want to issue a tokenized money market funds or like a stablecoin, it doesn't matter what the instrument you're trying to issue, we will provide all the APIs that you need in order to do that from day one. And if you want to say to do payments, whether that's sort of an an on-ramping experience from fiat to stablecoins or an off-ramping experience or just doing stablecoin to stablecoin payments, we provide all the necessary uh infrastructures including custody providers that's available for you to choose from including the ramp providers for you to pick as well as a lot of compliance related uh services that's all embedded inside this thing called Solana developer platform. So, the best way to think about what we as foundation is really building is a piece of public infrastructure because SDP in and itself is not the product in the sense we don't create all these services and that's provided by the foundation. In fact, SDP is the aggregation layer because in order for SDP to really function, we work with 23 currently 23 different infra providers to make it live, right? So, we have like uh eight plus different custodian providers. We have uh four five different ramp providers and many different infra uh like node infrastructure providers all under the hood to power this entire thing. And hence it's very much I would call it ecosystem effort to enable um Solana as enterprise friendly as possible. We are as open as permissionless as you can get, but the purpose of SDP is to provide something that's more enterprise grade. It has the permissioning, it has the compliance and and very soon will have the privacy features that as an institution, you have the choice to uh to essentially opt in and configure to the requirement that you need in order to say issue a genius compliant stablecoin. Gotcha. I think you called out some specific examples, you know, tokenizing money market funds, doing doing payments for some of these institutions. Um, from the post, I think, you know, Mastercard, Western Union were some early partners called out. Um, it seems like some of these early examples are maybe heavily payment focused. Are there other maybe obvious product integrations you expect to see, you know, come the next 12-18 months?

[00:15:30]100% uh it wouldn't be that long, by the way, 12 to 18 months. We're trying to shrink it to 6 to 9 months. That's the speed of how quickly we want we want to move. But um the most immediate one that we want to push out is on the trading module. Um, now, what does that mean? So, if you think about the entire life cycle of what we are trying to envision is, if you're a fund manager, you're issuing a tokenized money market funds or whatnot, maybe there's some funding mechanism you want to enable and that's through the payments module. So, you know, you have your customers ramp it to subscribe to your fund, etc. or off-ramp it and back to fiat. But then you also want to be able to have a distribution net channel so that you can trade it say on certain selected exchanges or or deposit that into different vaults and convert it into other yield bearing assets, etc. So, that's all going to be happening in this new module which we call trading. A lot of the things are still yet to be defined, but in my world is basically um you want to have that end-to-end flow so such that you have the issuance, i.e. the origination of the assets, and then you create this secondary market. And of course, again, we're not creating the secondary market by the foundation. It's it's aggregating the different um liquidity venues and different market makers and stuff and power that together to create a trading module that allows um different financial institutions leverage.

[00:16:48]I think that makes a ton of sense. So, kind of um you know, you've started sort of with this with the starting place and you can add on top of it, build out additional APIs and capabilities. That's sort of all part of of this SDP platform. Are there maybe outside of of the SDP initiative, like are there other do you do you see other weak points within the ecosystem where the foundation can can play a role? And are you thinking about some of those like some future sort of products that you might lean in there?

[00:17:14]>> Yeah.

[00:17:15]I mean, I'll only give from my vantage point what I see, but what I say is much smaller than the total set of everything that Solana Foundation as a whole is looking at because just to give an example, right? We have people looking at how to do trading, how to do perps and dexes better. I don't cover those.

[00:17:31]And there also things looking into uh DeFi, prediction markets, etc. Super exciting stuff. And of course, there's a whole big AI uh part that I think we you you probably should talk about that um uh at some later shows because it's really exciting what we're doing with XPO2, with MPP and many other things right now. And uh hoping that Solana continues winning on that front as well.

[00:17:53]Uh going back to what I'm looking at from the the digital asset side, uh one of the I think areas that we really want to invest a lot of resources is on privacy and compliance. Um, and again, it's kind of almost obvious, right? Like every institution as they get serious enough to be on chain, this is a prerequisite to have. Now, you can totally get privacy today if you're on a permissioned blockchain. And that's what we've done before with either Hyperledger Base or some of the newer chains these days. You can achieve that uh privacy preserving aspect totally. But what are you sacrificing?

[00:18:27]Every single time as you're thinking about privacy, there's always a trade-off. In this particular instance, the way to achieve privacy, you are at the expense of losing the liquidity access, losing the broader distribution effect coming from a public permissionless chain. So, of course, being Solana, we're thinking from the reverse. We are a public permissionless chain, but we still need to enable all these privacy features as well as compliance toolings for financial institutions to feel totally comfortable that they can transact in a compliant regulated way.

[00:18:55]That is not mutually exclusive, by the way. I think there's still this misconception among some of the banks, institution be like, you know, if I want to do something compliant, I got to be on a private permission chain. But if I just be in the wild west, you know, public chain. I think I hopefully, like, you know, it's also part of my job to kind of dispel that misconception because uh there's many different toolings we're building right now. Just, you know, using privacy as a good example that we're trying to create. So, my view on privacy is this. Privacy subtly is a very hard thing to solve, which is why no one has really cracked it successfully, right? There's no default winner on privacy. And also when you talk about privacy, even though privacy is just a single word, privacy actually means many different things to many different people. In fact, every single institution, even though all say financial institutions, they have very different desired outcome of the privacy as you're really digging deeper into the product requirement. And hence I think that's the way we need to treat it. We can't treat privacy as a single thing and therefore I give you something out of the box and that will just solve everything because there's no such thing that one sets one size fits all solution on privacy. Um and instead, the way we are thinking about it is is very much privacy is on a spectrum, right? What level of privacy are you looking at? Are you looking at a total secrecy, hiding your identity, hiding your values? Or you looking at something like confidentiality, which you're only hiding the value but necessarily the on-chain identity. Now, once we get to know the exact product requirements, we have specific modular uh developer tools that they can then leverage. Uh and it's a it's ongoing going work that not only on the protocol level from Solana network as a whole, we're doing a lot of active uh zero knowledge knowledge-related uh work. We're also working very actively with our ecosystem players who are continuing to innovate, whether that's say ZK MPC or whether that's FHE, TE, all these different solutions available on Solana. So then, the goal is we have a whole spectrum of options that we can present to any given financial institutions. And it's really up to them to tell us what is then that specific use case, that specific requirements. We can then tailor that for them.

[00:21:07]That makes a ton of sense to me.

[00:21:09]You know, I know maybe a few years back um there was a lot of excitement around different types of token extensions being used to enable, you know, more customizability around you know, white listing addresses or doing certain things like that. Another area that I think maybe tends to get avoided in the kind of on-chain discussions is this concept of like having some kind of KYC signifier, but um you know, you mentioned CK and some of these other technologies that it seems like there's a world where you get more of these larger institutions on chain um having like this maybe broad base of customers who can have a you know, a an encrypted way of you know, proving their credentials um in an on-chain environment but then use services from um a large institution.

[00:21:52]That feels like an unlock that we've not quite figured out. Is this something that that you're thinking about? Is it way into the the privacy conversation?

[00:22:00]Yeah, I think privacy and identity comes hand-in-hand and we do have something called Solana attestation services that's basically addressing this. Uh it hasn't been widely adopted at this moment, I don't think by a lot of the financial institutions, but it's certainly part of the suite of solutions we can cater uh for institution. Uh and then, I think within the token extension that you referenced, uh you know, as institution, you can curate your own allow list or block list, whatever you want. But that's essentially uh very similar to ERC-3643 and a few other sort of standards on the Ethereum world. You can perfectly curate the list of KYC'd wallets that could interact and use whatever token that you have created.

[00:22:42]Um maybe then getting to I think you made a great point around, you know, privacy means different things to different individuals, different institutions.

[00:22:52]Um I guess from a technical standpoint, it seems like a large focus there would just be having programmability to some extent.

[00:22:59]Like I think to you know, token extension capabilities is one example of that where it's not a a hard-coded, you know, it's either on or off. It's you have a wide variety of of options there.

[00:23:10]Are there other things from like APIs and interface access to like some of the on-chain data or how you record data on chain that uh that are part of that or what like what are some of those like maybe different layers of information and how to, you know, break that out?

[00:23:26]Yeah, um just on Solana itself, I would say there's three different modular approaches to privacy. So, uh yes, you're right. Already directly within the smart contract itself, the token extension smart contract, we have something called confidential transfers.

[00:23:41]So, confidential transfers is really um you know, if you want to be a bit technical, it's uh Elgammal encryption and it uses range proof to prove some things. Uh and what it really enables is to ensure confidentiality of that transaction, i.e. your address and my address are still as they are, but what's being hidden is the amount and the balances of our addresses. So then, people can't really query and have any idea what's going on. They'll just see an activity, but they don't know how much is going on. So, that's already available directly on the protocol, i.e. the the token program itself. Now, if you want a further control of the privacy, uh we have something called Contra, c o n t r a. So, Contra is think about that as a private execution environment that you can entirely set up your own.

[00:24:30]Um and it's actually I would say it's the closest you can get to having a permissioned environment but without being just completely creating your own siloed isolated island uh because Contra very much is an application built on Solana mainnet. So, you will still get the benefit of Solana mainnet, but you have this further enhancement, further flexibility to moving to a permissioned environment as when you want to do it.

[00:24:56]So, good example is say you're a bank and you want to create your tokenized deposits. The tokenized deposit, when it's minted, it's will still just at the initiation be minted on Solana mainnet because you need to update the state change and the actual existence of the money stays on mainnet. Of course, by then, you even at the start you can already imply uh sorry, you can already apply what some of the confidentiality I mentioned just now to make it everything completely confidential.

[00:25:21]You can then channel that into a Contra.

[00:25:24]So, Contra is a payment channel. You can channel the tokenized deposit you just minted into this payment channel. And once you channel into this specific payment channel, you can do whatever you want and the mainnet will have no visibility whatsoever of any activities happening here.

[00:25:40]So, who would play a good role as being network operator? It could be a bank, right? If you're thinking your JP Morgan of the world, you can set up your own sort of payment channel and within your payment channel, you can you're essentially the god of that network and you can set up any rules you want, any authorities, set up the fees of the network and of course, complete privacy from the rest of the mainnet.

[00:26:03]And as participants in your network are transacting one with one another, so again, in the example I'm giving, it could just be your normal retail depositors, right? They are bank banking with Chase, they have their own different deposits, everything is tokenized, they're all transacting this payment channel. This payment channel is is is equivalent to a intranet of a bank and the bank will do all the activities and once the bank is done with its say daily activities, it can then roll back the net balance, the net amount back to the mainnet and having the state change and stuff. So, that's the way of thinking about Contra as a further enhancement of the privacy that you can just have a private execution environment and do many different things within it. Um and then the third thing that we have is also a special ZK uh programming language called Solana Noir. Uh so, [snorts] Solana Noir is actually developed in uh collaboration with Aztec, which is a different L1 chain that does privacy and privacy first. Uh they have this programming language called Noir. It's very similar to Rust. Uh if you're coder, you'd probably find that quite friendly to use. Uh and the goal is just basically uh traditionally as you're creating your ZK kind of applications, you have to use this other programming language called Circom and it's it's very cumbersome to to use. I I tried it when I was back at Stanford to do it. I I couldn't do it. Maybe I'm just not a good developer, but it's very hard to to write in in Circom. So, in any case, the Noir programming language is the new version and we're doing that in collab in collaboration with Aztec. So, I would say [snorts] this is more suited for like truly native like developers who want to just build like privacy-first applications, whether that's say a DeFi protocol or whatever and you can code everything up directly using Solana Noir. Great. Yeah, so a lot of different angles and a lot of different approaches being taken for for different use cases. Maybe we can shift in a slightly different direction. I'd love to get your viewpoint on when it comes to like on-chain activity and sort of maybe setting metrics for success. Um I think as an industry, we've we've grown in some ways, maybe not grown in some others, but at the very least, you know, just throwing up raw TVL and active address numbers is kind of like out the window already. Um how do you, like looking at data on chain to sort of measure growth and success of the network? Like what are you looking at to see that institutions are coming on chain, capital is being allocated to certain products? Like what what are the metrics of interest?

[00:28:25]Yeah, um I totally agree with you. I think pure TVL doesn't really say much.

[00:28:29]You can have all the money you want to be locked in, but if it doesn't move, it doesn't it doesn't do anything. Um I think, you know, some of the like you know, in collab collaboration with uh Blocksworks as well, we have this light speed dashboard, which I think is fantastic because it does measure a lot of the uh really interesting economics, right? There's the total application revenue, there's the net network uh rev and stuff like that, which is kind of interesting because going back to one of the earlier questions, we're thinking, well, how much money can a developer actually make? The actual economics you can extract from the network, I think that's telling because you know, the network that can benefit the most to developers will naturally uh continue to attract this developer ecosystem to continue to grow on it on this. And I I believe Solana, at least for 2025, all the metrics like we're hitting the top uh in in across a lot of these eco economic values that that that is actually attributed to developers. I think the other just obvious thing to think about is liquidity. Like how quickly what the velocity of money, how quickly does money really moves and recycles on the network? And Solana is pretty high.

[00:29:33]I think even if you look at like DEX volume, daily DEX volume on Solana, uh right now we're in a bit of a trough just because like some of the market up and downs. I think it's around roughly 3 billion like uh DEX volume like on a daily daily average is is much higher like around 2025 end of last year. So that gives you a pretty good sense of how much liquidity, how much money is actually being used within the ecosystem, right? On a daily daily level. And I think that's important because when you compare that to some of the other chains, they might be able to process like say billions of transactions, but that just might be in a single transaction that is it. Like you never do anything more with it. And it doesn't really say much because it might just be a POC or whatever and then it has one single transaction. But I think the more you important thing is just thinking about how money can continue to grow and to continue to move because that would be in the long term really important for any financial institutions as they're thinking about the impact of liquidity. Um, I guess the final thing I would say, I don't have a perfect measure for that, but maybe looking at you know, active wallet addresses and stuff is a very good indication because having good retail liquidity is extremely important and it's not just for cryptos. I think you know, if anything Robinhood of the world has proven why that is really valuable, right? Because it gives you a layer of diversification for institutions. If you have a very rich retail liquidity as well as the institutional liquidity cuz when things go south, you need that retail part to really help to to save part of it. So um, this is why it's really powerful on Solana because the retail liquidity side is extremely deep and of course it's thanks to many years of I guess different use cases driving that network activities and great products products like Jupiter, Radium, you know, Titan and of the world that's really driving a lot of the trading venues that enables very smooth user experience. So I would say that's really important measure as well just thinking about the liquidity on the retail as well as institutional. You really want to have a balanced spread rather than one or the other.

[00:31:43]Maybe you can you know, focusing on the institutional side can you like sort of make the pitch like why why institutions should be looking to build on Solana and do and do some of these factors like does having this this like high amount of retail activity and liquidity make that conversation easier in you know, speaking to institutions? Yeah.

[00:32:04]I think you know, I in some other podcasts I I said it like it's simple it's just liquidity and I'll unpack a bit more into it. But I still very much believe for any institutions, why would you be on blockchain in the first place?

[00:32:17]You're looking for a new distribution channel to really expand your your reach whether it's your customer distribution, whether it's your revenue distribution.

[00:32:24]You're just looking to expand, right?

[00:32:26]Your potential business surface area and hence blockchain is the place to be and I think what's really stand out on Solana is liquidity. Liquidity on Solana is the top amongst all of the current public chains. Now I think just to also unpack a little bit because increasingly you still have a lot of these other I guess competitions that's more sort of on a semi-public or permissioned level because of privacy and and other reasons.

[00:32:55]Um I think there's a there's a place for a lot of these things, but I think the fundamental question for a lot of institution to really ask is still why do you need blockchain in the first place? Do you need a blockchain for database upgrade? If you do so, can the existing core banking ledger upgrades sort of suffice to that need? Would you really need a blockchain but that's completely permissioned because what's the usage of that? So I've been thinking a lot around this, right? Like especially during my six years at Visa having all these conversations with banks. I think ultimately the conclusion is if you truly want to use blockchain, you want it because it is public permissionless for the first time.

[00:33:34]Blockchains are these general purpose platforms that could enable many things and it's just an aggregation platform that aggregates different liquidity venues into a single thing and that is super powerful because in today's world you can't trade bonds with equity. You can't do swaps between these things. You can't trade like money market funds with a with a random commodities, but it's entirely possible on blockchains because things are composable, right? Thanks to smart contract everything is composable.

[00:34:04]But the point therefore is you need a public permissionless blockchain that could actually aggregates all these different liquidities in a single venue rather than creating a and this is partly also the reason why EVM and L2s doesn't work because it's once again it's this fragmentation of liquidity that then defeats the whole purpose of why single like monolithic kind of a general purpose blockchain is important.

[00:34:29]And so that would be the sort of you know, if institutions really serious about like thinking about the long-term benefits and why blockchain in the first place, I think ultimately you'll come back to these kind of I guess philosophical comparisons and make a make a choice and hence that's why I think Solana has made a bet, right? Even right from the beginning of the network design. It wants to be monolithic.

[00:34:51]There's many different turns in which it could become much more modular the way Ethereum has become, but it chose not to and I think it really pays off because now as you're looking at the liquidity, the concentration of all these things Solana really benefits a lot of from that than many other L1s or L2s out there.

[00:35:10]I do think that makes a ton of sense and we've seen more of a focus in the past year around like listing more non-native assets on Solana which I think kind of exemplifies the point that you're making that there's this maybe even more broadly within within crypto. I think we've seen a trend there of maybe a realization that you do just want to have all of these disparate you know, assets all trading in one location that's that's incredibly valuable to have. Um, maybe just to get your view you know, as we talked about institutions obviously a DAS last week.

[00:35:42]I think it was a pretty exciting conference from the perspective of the number of big names that were there you know, the SEC, the CFTC and Fed Reserve members showing up and showing like general support for digital assets.

[00:35:54]With the regulatory picture changing and I don't know your experience working at Visa for several years. Like do you do you see this now like within with conversations with some of these institutional players? Like are we really at an inflection point for adoption of of you know, coming on chain or using blockchain for services? Cuz I could recall you know, 5-6 years ago people people tend to say the same things at a lot of the like very you know, hype moments in in market cycles.

[00:36:23]But you think you know, is this time different? There really is like a a mass kind of onboarding of institutions coming here.

[00:36:29]I would say yes, but it's not like a yes either or kind of thing because I think it's just the different phases of graduation if you will from doing nothing to everything on chain and we're certainly not to the everything on chain stage. Um I think 2025 with genius and everything is a very clear signal. It's a very clear inflection point of that zero to one because you know, all the I've had conversation with a hundred plus different banks, right? And every single conversation is with the most senior kind of team in these banks because it's typically a very top-down directive from the CEO saying we need to do something stablecoin. Even if they don't know what they need to do. They just say we need to do something.

[00:37:19]And hence it's a it's a very clear push from the executive and then as you know, in institutions it helps a lot if you have the executive sponsorship to do things. So if it comes directly from the CEO, I think it gives people a lot more faith and momentum to to really push for things. Now I think coming into this year that trend continues to grow.

[00:37:41]Of course I think on the Clarity Act we're still pending a lot of the things to to to be sorted out.

[00:37:46]I think even with that, right? I think um institutions are still navigating. I think there's there's several things they need to navigate. Like again, really clearly define the go-to-market use cases is hard because in one way you sort of want to follow many what other people are doing which you know, stablecoins are good example.

[00:38:06]Stablecoin creates this massive FOMO, but ultimately does every single bank need a stablecoin? The answer is no.

[00:38:11]Many many banks might just need to use stable existing stablecoins and some might not even if they are just purely domestic focused, but they might be looking for other venues of why crypto might make sense. So I think they still need time just to really internalize like fundamentally what's the reason why they might be doing something. I think there's also we need a lot more regulatory framework guidance and that's just going to take time.

[00:38:38]I don't think any single act will change everything overnight just because you know, the interpretation of different crypto assets. What does that mean for the Basel kind of treatment on balance sheet, how much you know, other assets they need to hold. I think these are real conversation like like actual practical conversations a lot of the treasury teams are trying to navigate before they can make sense of how how they can conduct activities on chain. But I would say that it's a lot less like hard to convince banks to kind of come on chain. Maybe we're in a different vantage point because majority of the conversations we're having with institutions are you know, they've already made up their mind, but they're just making that selection choice of you know, why Solana as opposed to other chains and we do a pretty good job to convince them why Solana.

[00:39:31]But you know, it's not just like why do you even need to build on blockchain in the first place which I think is kind of the conversation I was having maybe three years, four years ago.

[00:39:41]So that's a good sign.

[00:39:43]And hence, yeah, I think we're in that transition phase. I don't think this year or next year is the year, but, you know, I'll be very surprised if in 5 years time we don't see things at scale.

[00:39:54]And this time it's really at scale, whether that's say on the retail side or a lot of the wholesale activities. I do think we're going to be happening thing doing things at scale.

[00:40:03]I think that's that's a great perspective. It's not It's not why blockchain anymore. It's It's where.

[00:40:08]It's how. It's which products. Um that's the I think that's a great call out. Um we talked a little bit about I think you mentioned, you know, this this idea of internet capital markets, this thesis, you know, the on-chain Nasdaq um view for Solana. I guess maybe can you Can you reaffirm like that is still sort of like a core thesis or vision for the future of Solana? And And if so, like talk me through like what do you What do you see as like bull and bear case outcomes for this thesis over the next, you know, if it's 5 10 years If it's that longer term, you know, mass adoption framework, um what do you see?

[00:40:40]Yeah. I mean, very much the core focus.

[00:40:43]Everyone on the foundation We have 80 people and every single individual working on the foundation is trying to strive for the internet capital market, whichever way that might mean. And you know, when we talk about internet capital market, that means it's trying to provide the financial infrastructure for the 5 to 6 billion people on uh right? It's not just say capital market means only capital players. It means for everyone. And hence, that goes back to the different application and use cases on Solana. It is general purpose. It's not just say a payments chain only. It's not a trading chain only. It is a chain that could support all different use cases because that is the the ultimate sort of internet capital market what it means. Now, I think what's really important even right from the beginning when Anatoly started designing the the network is his vision being that this is a Nasdaq chain like in uh of the future.

[00:41:32]What What does that translating to the infrastructure requirement, right? You want it to be super super fast. Want it to be very scalable, very very reliable and secure.

[00:41:41]Those are the core premises for which Solana was being built, which is very different from Ethereum when it was being built. And that has been a big massive differentiator in for a lot of financial institutions as they're choosing between chains.

[00:41:54]Sure, EVM or Ethereum is still the sort of the default chain, but the TPS continue to be extremely low, right? You can't have just 14 TPS uh when a a serious financial institution is trying to do like active trading or like uh wholesale activities.

[00:42:11]Uh where Solana proves the opposite. And I think if you look more into the newer L1s these days, they're striving for the level that Solana is trying to achieve out there as well. Um I think Yeah, so going back to your question, I think internet capital market is very much the core focus. And the bull versus bear scenario, I mean, you know, the the bull scenario would be we grow 10x in say or way even more in in stablecoin liquidity volume. Like if we can, you know, people are projecting stablecoin market cap is grow going to grow into trillions of dollars. Question is just more how much can Solana capture that growth in the next 5 years? I would very much like to see Solana as being the number one chain to capture a lot of these growth, and I'm very confident there's a very clear path for us to do so. So, we're all working very hard with different industry players to capture that, you know, growth. Uh if we can even get like, you know, uh like several billions out of that trillion, I think hundreds of billions out of that trillion, I think that's a that's a clear win, but we can probably get even more than that.

[00:43:17]Um and then I think a bear case would be regulation comes backward, and there's many reasons why that might be going backward. That's completely out of hand.

[00:43:27]I think that's more like a macro uh influence, and let's see how it goes one way or another. If that goes, I think that will dampen the entire industry momentum.

[00:43:37]Having said that, I think one really really valuable thing about Solana and that, you know, what stood out about Solana rest versus rest of the other chains, I think Solana is probably the chain that got hit hardest than than any other chains for a long time, and it really bounced back really strong. Um and weirdly, I think both within foundation, but also just the entire ecosystem builders, they almost welcome the time when we go back to a winter uh again because they feel like this is the time to build. This is the time to ship. And they know they can go through that hardship, whereas many others might just like, you know, decide to leave and stuff. So, I kind of like that mentality, and this is sort of why I also wanted to join Solana because I think it gives people like even a more stronger sense of purpose, if you will, uh during the bear market case than during the bull case.

[00:44:25]Uh that incentivizes us to be more productive.

[00:44:28]Yeah, that is a good point. Um maybe to to close things off, I'm curious like leaning into that idea. Um Solana definitely had to recover from sort of the, you know, the downtime days, the reputation of, you know, the network going offline um during some difficulties like early on in in the history of the network. Um more recently, I would say that the chain has become more strongly associated with like meme coin activity, you know, like people saying, "Oh, it's all gambling."

[00:44:54]Do you Has Do you think this has had any negative impact on kind of like, you know, conversations with institutions?

[00:45:01]Is there a need to kind of like distance the Solana brand from that activity? Or is it's fine? It's like just we're growing through, you know, that famous quote of just like, you know, early things tend to look like a toy, and then you kind of find out the real use cases later on down the road. Is it's like there's a natural expectation that it can evolve into more than just, you know, meme coin trading?

[00:45:22]Yeah, I think that's a good question.

[00:45:23]And you know, not going to deny deny. I think certainly a lot of institutions have that misconception. Well, like, you know, while other people like to speak campaign or having narratives, this is what they typically like to use. And hence, it does take some explanation to do it, but I think we certainly are not trying to distance anything away because we as the Solana Foundation, we are, you know, we're trying to hear to support the ecosystem growth, no matter whatever way that might be, right? And again, Solana is a completely public permissionless chain. Uh we never dictate what use case we want or don't want. I mean, you know, we say we want to be the internet capital market, but it doesn't mean then therefore meme coins are not allowed, but only institutional cases are allowed. That's never been the case. So, being completely open and permissionless has always been the ethos, and we're not going to change that. But I think in terms of the explanation for institutions, I think this is where it's important to highlight. Well, firstly, you know, meme coins and all of that happened um before the whole entire institutional adoption really took place on a macro level. Like, frankly, there was just no institutions playing in the crypto blockchain ecosystem.

[00:46:30]Uh that was back in 2022. Very few are out there. And hence, who are the first set of adopters of crypto? These are the retail people, right? This is when we talk about whether that's NFT, metaverse, or meme coins. That's the first wave of true adoption of crypto.

[00:46:46]And I don't think anyone who's been in the this industry for long long enough should just like ignore or deny that history because that history is what made crypto today. Without that, I think we it might it might not exist or it might look very different. So, I think that, you know, the Solana evolution reflects that. And I would actually say because of that, again, we did not anticipate anything, as I said, when Anatoly started building. His only His vision is the Nasdaq of the world.

[00:47:11]And hence, what's most important is on the performance of the network. You want to be resilient. You want to be fast.

[00:47:17]And so be it if it's meme coin, you know, launching Trump coin or whatever.

[00:47:20]Like, it it the the network has proven it will not go down. It is resilient. It is highly performant. I maintained a very good and decent gas fee throughout the period, while other chains might spike up because of all these crazy network activities. I think that's really demonstrating the technology like prowess or strength of Solana versus many others. So, I think going to 2026, I would say Solana has been battle-tested by many different sets of use cases. If anyone who still want to issue a meme coin or NFT, they would come to Solana because it is the best network in terms of performance. But the same principle applies to anyone who want to really issue like a large, say, tokenized money market funds at the same time of issuing a stablecoin because you know Solana also can handle exactly the same way as they have done it. So, I would say that's the kind of work we need to explain to uh FIs as we're saying, you know, why it's almost actually very beneficial for the network for us to go through those periods. And thanks to all these meme coins and stuff, that's why we have a very rich uh retail liquidity ecosystem, as I mentioned before, because in many ways meme coins and NFTs are the first uh sort of I would say entry point for a lot of these retail adopters to gain financial literacy, right? To really understand how to trade, how to transact anything, and to have uh custody infrastructure in the first place. And that's kind of important as you're thinking about in the long run what it means for uh financial institutions.

[00:48:48]Great points. And the um to the like the Trump meme coin as an example, I think, you know, that was definitely a a very high moment in terms of retail speculative trading activity, but it also drove a large jump in stablecoin total stablecoin balances on on Solana.

[00:49:05]So, um could be that that drives sort of that next wave of of capital that sort of moves in, and then maybe it finds, you know, where is the next area to kind of go along in that financial journey? Maybe it's vaults. Maybe it's, you know, doing things in DeFi. Maybe it's more structured products or whatever else comes on chain. Um but it at least it brought some additional capital along with it. Um All right, Cathie. Well, it was a great conversation. Um and you mentioned early on um when we were talking about the SDP, um hopefully 6 to 9 months um or sooner for um kind of like more modules and and things coming um along on that product platform. So, I guess we'll be excited to see what comes maybe within the next, you know, month, 2 months, or weeks down the road there.

[00:49:46]I'll be excited to see what you guys can ship and how quickly you can move things along on that front. But, it was great to have you on and great conversation today.

[00:49:54]Thank you so much for having me, Danny.

[00:49:56]Awesome. Thanks again, Catherine, and to all the listeners out there, we will catch you next time.

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