EP. 110 | The Decentralization of Money: Building the Internet Capital Market on Solana with Catherine Gu

Catherine Gu has always been at the center of the shift toward the decentralization of money, a transformation that was once theoretical but is now actively reshaping global financial markets through stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure. Inspired in part by Hayek’s vision of competing private forms of money, Catherine’s work sits at the intersection of that idea and its real-world implementation. As Head of Product for Digital Assets at the Solana Foundation, she is helping build what is increasingly viewed as the internet capital market, where speed, scale, and global access redefine how value moves. Before joining Solana, she was one of the earliest members of Visa’s crypto team, where she spent years bridging traditional finance and blockchain and leading the development of tokenized asset infrastructure designed for financial institutions. In this conversation, Ari and Catherine trace that journey and explore what it means for the future of financial markets. We discuss why Solana has emerged as a critical platform for stablecoin activity, what it means to embed compliance and trust into infrastructure from the outset, and how performance, liquidity, and developer resilience are shaping the next phase of institutional adoption. This is no longer a debate about whether money will evolve. It is a conversation about how that evolution is being built in real time.