Solana Hires Former Visa Executive to Lead Capital Markets Push

Solana:- There are currently very few blockchains that doubling down on the vision of internet capital markets as Solana. It is making significant strides by partnering with tokenized platforms like xstocks and tokenizing equities to help get the capital markets on-chain.

This development is further highlighted by Solana’s significant appointment of Catherine Gu on January 6.

In a X post, Catherine Gu, a former Visa executive, announced her appointment as as Head of Product, Digital Assets, marking another high-profile transition from traditional finance into blockchain infrastructure.

“Why? Three words: internet capital markets,” Gu wrote, explaining her motivation for choosing Solana as the platform for her next chapter.

Who is Catherine Gu, Solana’s New Product Head?

Catherine Gu is a payments and digital-assets executive best known for leading Visa’s work on stablecoins, CBDCs, and tokenized assets, before joining the Solana Foundation as Head of Product, Digital Assets.

Her career spans quantitative finance, blockchain research, and institutional payments infrastructure, placing her among a small group of executives who have worked hands-on across both traditional financial systems and on-chain technology.

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Gu began her career in quantitative trading at a hedge fund, where she worked on market-driven models and trading systems. That background, she has said, shaped her understanding of how capital markets operate at scale.

Internet Capital Markets as the Focus

In her Linkedin post, Gu makes clear that her focus will be on turning blockchain use cases These are particularly around tokenization, stablecoins, and capital markets, turning them into into real, scalable products, rather than pilot programs or early-stage demos that never reach commercial scale.

She referred to moving “beyond POCs and MVPs” highlighting a broader industry frustration with years of blockchain trials that have failed to translate into meaningful adoption.

Gu frames “internet capital markets” as the next phase of financial infrastructure, where assets are issued, traded, and settled directly on-chain, using high-performance blockchains rather than legacy market plumbing.

She positions Solana as uniquely suited for this role, citing its high throughput, low latency, and deep liquidity. These according to her are characteristics required to support capital markets rather than niche crypto applications.

Also Read: The Coming Institutional Crypto Hiring Wave

Well it is evident. The total distributed asset value across blockchains has reached over $20 billion as of January 2026. This represents nearly a 4% growth from the previous month. On the institutional front too, over $800 million of public equity had been tokenized by early 2026.