Lightspeed How Institutions Are Moving Onchain | Catherine Gu
Apr 14, 2026
Catherine Gu, Head of Product for Digital Assets at the Solana Foundation and former Visa product lead, talks institutional adoption and tokenization. She covers payments infrastructure, privacy and KYC tooling, developer and trading platforms, onchain metrics beyond TVL, liquidity dynamics, and Solana’s vision for internet capital markets.
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From Quant To Visa To Tokenization
- Catherine Gu moved from quant roles to Visa then into crypto after Stanford, starting with CBDC work and tokenization at Visa.
- At Visa she built the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform and worked with BBVA to issue a euro stablecoin, which shaped her institutional focus.
SDP Is An Enterprise Aggregation Layer
- Solana Developer Platform (SDP) is an aggregation layer of APIs and third-party services to make Solana enterprise friendly.
- SDP integrates 23 providers including custodians, rent services, and compliance tooling so institutions can configure permissioning and privacy.
Design End To End Token Lifecycle
- Build end-to-end flows: issue tokenized assets, enable payments for subscription/redemption, then provide trading/distribution channels.
- Solana's next SDP module is Trading to aggregate venues, market makers, and secondary markets for issuers.