In the rapidly evolving financial landscape, the rise of decentralized technologies presents groundbreaking opportunities and challenges. The Solana Foundation is at the forefront of this evolution, building a decentralized ecosystem designed to promote financial access and innovate the financial services sector. Spearheading this vision is Catherine Gu, the Head of Product and Digital Assets at the Solana Foundation, who brings her extensive experience from Visa to advance Solana’s mission.
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**Host**: The Solana Foundation was created to advance the adoption of decentralized technologies as a public good. As the original promise of the internet faces increasing centralization, decentralized networks do offer a path forward. The Solana Foundation is focused on expanding the Solana ecosystem by building permissionless infrastructure designed for a global market.
**Host**: Well, joining us today is Catherine Gu, head of product and digital assets at the Solana Foundation. Catherine, great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.
**Catherine Gu**: Well, I understand that you spent 6 years at Visa before transitioning to the Solana Foundation. So tell me about the catalyst that convinced you it was time to leave Trap 5 Payments and to help lead the Sallana Foundation.
**Catherine Gu**: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. For sure, I think, you know, I've learned a ton of stuff around payments, but also just around digital, like, money movement in general while I was at Visa. But I think what's really clear is this trend, this transition, right, as the entire industry is looking at innovation and technology and what can deliver in the future, which is 24/7, always on global infrastructure.
**Catherine Guo**: So, what is really clear to me and what attracted me to Savannah is this notion of internet capital markets. I think those three words capture the vision as well as kind of, you know, what's ahead very, very accurately. And it is true that as we're thinking about what is needed for the financial market infrastructure, there's no. Than that, you have to have trading hours during the market time and off the market time, because markets should be 24/7 and therefore money should be moving all the time. And so thinking about blockchain and what can really deliver in this sort of new digital AI age, I think is a really important thing to think about, you know, like, fundamentally what new infrastructure can help to create for the ecosystem.
**Host**: Yeah, and Catherine, building on what you just said, how do you envision Solana building a new financial infrastructure that remains accessible to everyone, and not just the tech-savvy crypto audience?
**Catherine Gu**: Absolutely, I think the number one thing is about liquidity because to create any successful network, you have to have a very rich, but also diverse liquidity. So I think a lot of the times people focus on, you know, TVL as a metric, which is total value locked. It might not be the most useful type of metric to look because you might have a massive amount of wealth, let's say, what assets being locked on a particular network. But if they're not moving, i.e., if they're not liquid enough, that it doesn't really deliver value and therefore, like, deliver the right use cases for the users on top of those networks.
**Catherine Gu**: So what I see on Solana is, is actually, it's both very liquid, it has a very good depth, but it's also very high in terms of transaction volume, and that's what we care about. And I think, you know, what's important is thinking about having a neutral blockchain infrastructure that can serve for all types of users, right? Whether you're a gaming kind of company or whether you're a retail user or like a financial institution, very diverse and different needs and product requirements. But the important thing is, can you all transact on the same neutral blockchain? And that's really important. And I think Solana has the features that can really cater for all of these different types of use cases.
**Host**: Yeah, and as the new year gets underway, a lot of focus has been on institutional adoption. So what do you see as the most critical lesson for major payment providers that are exploring blockchain today? And what is the one piece of advice that you would give to institutional leaders listening in right now?
**Catherine Gu**: You know, I, having been at Visa for the past almost six years, I definitely have seen a lot in terms of that learning curve, so to speak, because at the very beginning when crypto everything existed, I think we really see this as a wild west, right? It's not really serious or anything for payments, but I think what's really important, especially last year, as everyone knows, that regulatory environment changed. It is a very important tipping point.
**Catherine Gu**: I think nowadays we start to get a lot more kind of convincing data to see, for example, how much stablepay is being used for real payments. It's not just wash trading, but for real payments, whether that's in B2B international cross-border payments or in retail B2C or like even peer-to-peer sort of like cross-border remittance flows. And that's really important because I think for, they need the real signal to know that there is a real business opportunity out there. It's not just some random, you know, innovation or research that might just die after a few years. Like this is here to stay, and it actually brings new revenue generation for the businesses, which I think is ultimately the most important signal that, for payments companies, for just financial institutions in general, you know, that's what they're looking for.
**Host**: Well, Catherine, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate your time and all of your insights.
**Catherine Gu**: Thank you so much for having me.