# Solana's Institutional Pivot: Stablecoins, RWAs, and AI Integration

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-03

## Transcript

We as a chain are actually winning on the AI race, which is really exciting to see.
We have a whole team dedicated to building AI.
What's up, everybody?
It's LGDUSE here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that desperately hopes we get another meme coin season.
And I'm not ending this podcast until I'm guaranteed that we get one.
Today is April 3rd, 2026, recording late on April 2nd.
One of the big questions in the bear market is about Solana.
What is it?
What is its role going forward?
How does it stay competitive in RWAs and stable coins and this massive institutional wave that we talk about every single day on the show?
How much do institutions really want to use it?
And what is that pitch?
We get asked this question literally every single day in our Discord, on the show, everywhere.
And today we have just the perfect person to talk about it.
Catherine Goo, head of product at digital assets at the Solana Foundation is with us to answer all of my interrogative questions about a chain that I have used millions of times.
Today's episode is brought to you by Midnight, bringing rational privacy to blockchain and some turn crypto tax chaos into confidence.
Catherine, welcome to the Milk Road Show.
Thank you so much for having me, LG.
I didn't even tell you I was gonna bring up meme coins, okay.
I know.
What a surprise.
Ahead of product.
I don't think you're ahead of meme coin, so we're not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna tell you what I've been doing in meme coins.
We have much bigger things to talk about, Catherine.
Um, what I want to ask you, I think maybe just to for people to get an intro to you and just what you do at Solana Foundation, talk us through like what ahead of product for digital assets at somewhere like the Solana Foundation.
What do you do day to day?
Kind of what what are you responsible for?
For sure.
So I cover everything on the institutional side, right?
So whether it's a payments company, a bank, an asset manager who want to build on Solana, I work very closely with our growth team and very closely with our engineering team to really figure out different product solutions that might be needed.
And there could be areas in which um we need to build public infrastructure, so to speak, on Solana.
So things like you know, APIs or things like dev toolings, uh, were good UIUX that you know can make that entire onboarding and user experience as seamless as possible on Solana.
These are the things that we think about every single day based on the client conversations.
So from a product angle, this is you know how we navigate from a foundation, what kind of product we can we can create.
Got it.
And what what what kind of company is is most is is ringing the bell the most often these days?
Like who is who is banging on the door, being like, we gotta get on Solana?
Who are you having conversations with?
You don't have to tell us who, but what type of company?
What kind of thing?
Yeah, honestly, everyone.
I would say uh we have some really major big fintechs, big techs, uh payment companies that are having active conversations.
I mean, publicly known, you already see that Western Union, Pfizer, um uh, you know, and PayPal have already issued their stable coins on Solana, so have lots of really interesting ongoing conversations in terms of like, you know, what extra use cases and growth we can really help to bring to these uh new uh stablecoin ecosystems through the sort of vast uh development ecosystem that we have.
We're also having many active conversations right now with uh asset managers, investment banks uh on the buy side, just to think about you know what sort of new tokenized assets we can bring on chain as well.
So I would say it's a very broad spectrum of things happening all on chain, many different use cases, but ultimately they're just trying to use the same underlying infrastructure, which is you know the Solana network to essentially power all these different use cases.
I bet you must be so busy.
What can you kind of walk us through maybe the last year or two?
Like when did this, I'm assuming it has accelerated a lot.
Is there anything that kind of set that off?
Are there any catalysts that really like have started to bring people in and really made them way more interested?
I think 2025 is a massive turning point for everyone in the industry, right?
It's is thanks to Genius Act, uh, thanks to regulatory clarity.
I think for the first time you have faith uh amongst institutions, amongst banks to say, you know, we need to treat this new piece of technology, which is the blockchain much more seriously, right?
It's it's no longer just for I don't know for gambling uh spammy purposes, but it's actually a real piece of infrastructure that we can make use of.
And hence I think a very clear turning point is started at the start of 2025, in which, you know, with the whole kind of wave of stable coin discussions, every single bank, every financial institution is looking to build some sort of stablecoin strategy.
Now, I think that's the kicking of the conversation in terms of like you know, an entry point into uh blockchain.
Solana, as you've seen in many uh metrics, is really winning the chart because we're the number one in terms of DEX volume, number one in terms of stablecoin transaction.
Um, actually, I think recently it's like topping 600 billion or something volume, is like crazy amount of um transaction happening on Solana every single day through stablecoin activities.
Um, and I think with that in mind, right?
Stablecoin represents liquidity, represents money on chain.
Then the next question is well, what do you do with these money?
Uh it brings us to the next phase, which is all around tokenization, real world assets.
And that's clearly something we are seeing uh gaining even further momentum coming into 2026.
And I would say into 26 and 27, it would be the year of tokenization, and I would think you know, a lot more financial institutions to bring uh more kind of diverse type of assets, not just sort of your vanilla money market funds, but you know, maybe some corporate funds or some other sort of uh fixed income credit market uh structure products to come in on chain.
I think that would be really really interesting.
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Wow, don't tell don't tell the people coming on Solana that you called their money market funds vanilla.
Oh my god.
This is the most attractive, but still, you know.
It's okay.
We we we make an effort.
I personally make an effort uh with a lot of our guests.
I'm like, please make stable coins exciting for us and our audience.
Like it seems so straightforward, but there's so much more happening behind the scenes.
Um, that uh, you know, it's funny to hear you call it vanilla.
What I what I want to know from you, uh Catherine, actually, before we get into the the the details of the products and that what people actually want to bring on chain, uh I do I said I wouldn't ask you about meme coins, but I am very curious, especially as somebody who has who has been in the DGen streets many times uh myself.
When these people are coming to you, right?
And these are these are people that manage uh billions of billions of dollars in assets and in a variety of ways.
Do they is Solana heavily associated with meme coins?
It it must be.
But is that is that is that a positive or negative or a negative?
Because you could also look at it as like no news is bad news either, uh, even though it's it's drastically different than the kind of stuff that they want to put on chain.
Yeah, I I would I would think is everything is good in the sense like it drives on-chain activities in general.
It is a very good case study to show how resilient, how highly perform and scalable a network can be.
And I think this is the battle test we're talking about, in which Solana has been through.
And meme coin is one thing, you know, back in the days, NFT is also a similar story.
So I think through every single cycle, you start to see where, whether it's retail or institutional gravitates too, right?
No one is telling them like Solana is designed for meme coins or whatever, but because of the fundamental features of the blockchain itself, it makes a lot of sense.
If you want to do a massive issuance of any type of assets, you come to something like Solana.
I would also just say that, you know, because of the fact that Solana is a very public permissionless chain, we as a foundation never sort of pick winners or losers and be like, this is the use case I want to see, and this the other use case I don't want to see.
I think I'm a firm believer of you know, market forces and capital like capitalism in general, in the sense, you know, you let the people choose.
You let the money decides where the use case is gonna be.
And hence having a very fully permissionless chain, you really allow any type of use case, use cases to grow or die, right?
And I think the growth or the evolution of Solana is a very perfect reflection of the evolution of the entire crypto industry.
We went through many different rounds of I would say growth phases, certainly NFT meme coins featured a lot of that.
And that by chance, you know, brought a huge amount of retail liquidity on chain.
And that happened to be all on Solana, which is why we're winning right now.
And this next phase, everyone knows is institutional TradFi sort of embedment into the crypto industry.
And you know, once again, this is where it's the most attractive venue for crypto is because they see all the liquidities already existing on chain, they see how performant Solana can be, and I think is a very good signal.
Got it.
Yeah, that's a good perspective.
Yeah, it's a definitely brought a lot of people on.
Um, let's let's switch to something that's a a little bit more uh down your alley, let's say.
Let's talk about stable coins.
And I said we try to make uh stable coins interesting here on the show, and and I think we have many times.
What I want to know is I think I think Solana is right there in being the leader for stable coins on chain.
I believe that you guys are at the top now.
You've kind of succeeded back to first place.
There's a little battle back and forth, but you guys are you guys are now there are now the there's now the largest supply of uh stable coins on Solana.
Congratulations.
Um, what what's driving that?
Like what is driving these stable coins to be created on Solana and like uh is this coming from uh crypto native companies that have been in the space, uh, or or the or is that banks actively uh stockpiling that and then choosing to do it on Solana, or maybe give us a picture of what exactly is driving that because we see the charts, but I don't think personally I know what is what that actually is.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I think uh a lot more data analysis, data insights is done on our part of which I, by the way I also think is a role that the foundation can definitely help to you know give more insights behind the data um if you look for example uh like in terms of uh some of the uh third party reports like Artemis right they've done a great I think two or three reports around stablecoin payments and you can see a lot of the breakdowns in terms of what stable coins are being used whether that's say for B2B payments, B2C or peer to peer transactions, all of those things and they highlight that Solana is uh like uh one of the top chains if not the number one chain dominating a lot of these use cases so this is very much just payment specifically that Solana is growing a very healthy trend right like I think Solana is competing with some of other ones like Tron and Tron we all know is because of USDT Tetheron Tron and hence I think it's good that that we're narrowing the gap and also like there's a lot more uh both uh some of these existing retail but much more like I would say regulated flows by PSPs or other companies remittance flows uh trying to transact and they choose Solana because it's cheap is fast, instant instant, right?
So all these features are really important.
I think another really dominating use case on Solana has always been trading.
And I think that's really important.
Again, you know, this is where like market makers, high-frequency traders, right?
hedge funds of the world, they would really want to gravitate to Solana because of super high speed to support a lot of these really cool kind of arbitrage uh opportunities or whatnot.
And Solana is actually the best venue to trade many native tokens, not only just uh so itself, but things like ETH, Bitcoin and many other sort of uh uh L1, L2 coins are now all being traded on Solana because what guess what?
Solana gives you the best spread, like the minimum slippage you can get compared to even centralized exchanges, and that's huge because if you think about it, on Solana being this Nasdaq of the future, it actually becomes like a new trading venue that can compete with Binance of the world and be like, I can offer you a better slippage than whatever you can get from a central exchange, and hence that's driving also a lot of uh stable point activities as a result.
What drives that what drives that those good like slippage rates?
Is that just a ton of liquidity on chain for Solana?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not the expert here, but I think a few factors is in play, right?
Because you do have a lot of these really uh amazing, like smart routing sort of uh optimization engines, like behind the hood, people like Jupiter, people like Titan, they're doing amazing jobs behind that.
You also have these new innovations called prop AMMs that really helps to uh identify good price discoveries.
So then you start to like uh compress the margins between the the bid and ask prices of those, and then I think the third thing is to do with liquidity.
Uh, that in general you have a very rich and healthy liquidity.
We have many different market makers, many different LPs all uh trading actively on Solana, and that continue to be a really uh important profile of I think what underlying Solana.
You mentioned in your prior answer, uh you gave a great analogy that Solana is the NASDAQ of the future.
Is that is that accurate?
Is that how you guys kind of picture the future of Solana?
Maybe tell us a little bit more about that.
Yeah, I mean, um, I actually didn't create it, uh, did not originate the analogy.
It was totally who uh who I've heard from his podcast, maybe dated uh back in 2021, 22, when he talked about Solana, and I think that is very, very true, right?
Because um, as we said, Solana has evolved through many different cycles.
We don't tend to uh you know design what use cases are meant for Solana, but what we do design is first principle, what this network must satisfy.
And I think to Solana, the most important things are if you want to build something Nasdaq of the world, it has to be super super fast, super, super resilient, super secure.
Like these are the core fundamentals to in order to support any type of financial applications to be happy on chain, which is a very different starting point if you think about it compared to how Ethereum got started, right?
So I think that fundamental difference sort of define what Solana is, and the other thing is also Solana being very monolithic, right?
Everything is entirely composable, it is like truly a general purpose chain that aggregates all these different use cases in a single venue.
And this NASDAQ is no longer just supporting tokenized equities, but it's supporting tokenized real world world assets of all kinds.
So that has always been the vision.
I think more recently, the way we've been sort of like describing the narrative is we want to be the internet capital market, which is a continuation of thinking about NASDAQ of the future sort of equivalent.
Being that we want to serve right five to six billion of the people of the world to support them in the internet capital market.
And that can be retail as well as institutional because there's many different types of financial um use cases that are out there, and we want to be that underlying infrastructure to power all of these things.
Got it.
What are internet capital markets?
The term that we heard are thrown around quite a lot last year as well.
Maybe just kind of give us your definition of it.
Yeah, my internet, my definition around internet capital market is thinking about what underpins today's financial market infrastructure, right?
And it could be something like DTCC, it could be something like a payment network, or it could be something like Swift.
All these different pieces are uh different kinds of financial market uh infrastructure that serves for different use cases.
Now, Solana wants to be the future of financial market infrastructure, or be the internet capital market.
What that really to me means, we want to support many different types of financial applications, be it in payments, be it in bond treasury or in equities or in commodities.
It it is this general purpose technology that can serve all these purposes, and again, you know, it's not just trying to be institutional focused only.
We're not just trying to support, say, repo trading alone or institutional wholesale activities, but there's many say B2C, uh C2B, like uh a lot of the the peer-to-peer transaction uh kind of interesting use cases as well.
So there can be continue to be a lot more on uh well the I would say derivatives of meme coin relating which is kind of a way for retail institutions to uh retail uh consumers to to access uh finance right through a different means and that's through on chain Solana is that underlying uh infrastructure that can power that so summarizing I think internet capital market is meant to serve the five six billion people out there for any type of financial applications right yeah okay that's that's actually that's a that's a really good definition is a great really great way to put it uh I I do want to talk I I do want to talk a little bit more about RWAs but while we're still we're kind of still on stable coins are kind of eared off um but I do want to ask you you were talking about um Tron and you were talking about Tether and and obviously we we cover a lot of uh tether and circle and sky and all the stablecoin leaners here is maybe kind of give us your your broader opinion as well um do you see how do you see the stable coin like race playing out like are we going to be stuck or is it going to be a circle and a tether for the long-term foreseeable future, or is is this still an industry that's ripe for competition for other players to come in, especially knowing that a lot of institutions have said that they themselves want to develop their own stable coins and then they might do that on Solana for all we know.
Yeah, I would fully expect uh having banks and finance institutions to play a much more active role in stable coins.
I think Scott Besson said it last year that he expects stablecoin to grow into trillions of dollars.
And that's not even exaggerating, right?
Because as people are estimating the potential uh TAM of uh real world assets that could be brought on chain, that's like several hundred trillions worth.
So, how much liquidity do you need to power that?
And that liquidity is basically how much stablecoin do you can you grow?
Is it can easily go into one to two trillion range, right?
Like if not more.
Today, I think the market cap around stablecoin is just around 250 billion.
So we are talking many X's of growth uh going down that future.
Now, the question is who is gonna be owning that entire growth trajectory.
I think it would be it would be very crazy to see if banks and existing Tradfy just stand on the side and let sort of the newcomers take the entire pie.
I do think it's a uh is a uh how could you say that the pie is growing for everyone?
So it's not like necessarily a zero-sum game.
Um, but if you you know look at the financial setup today of the world, who controls M0 M1 supply is the central bank and and then it's the commercial banks controlling the M0 and M1 supply.
And as stablecoin grows much more in relevance, they will become part of the money supply story, and hence it's inevitable for the banks to take a much more active role.
Now, it could be many different variations of what that could look like, right?
Like even money market funds could be a version of stable uh of liquidity, not necessarily stablecoin in a strict, strictest sense, but it is a uh a form of money, money or cash on chain.
Uh, many banks are also exploring tokenized deposits.
Again, it's different from being a stablecoin.
But if we're just thinking about in general, we need more cash on chain, we need more liquidity on chain to support the growing RWA trend.
Then I think it's gonna be some different forms of money available, uh, some of which might still be in the stablecoin as we know, but there could be many other uh variations of that, and it's most likely gonna be brought up around by banks as well as continue to be these sort of um uh newcomers.
Is it our banks are banks threatened right now?
Because I feel like it when you throw out numbers like that, and we talk about that a lot, right?
That those kind of projections that it's like, listen, stable coins are easily gonna 10x at least in supply.
Yeah, that's obviously a huge opportunity, but I guess that's what's driving banks to maybe scramble to be ready.
But is there a lot of resistance going on there, Catherine?
Yeah, I mean, I um, you know, before joining Solana, the CIA, I was at Visa for the past six years, and I spent many, many hours with banks.
I would say that they're worried about deposit flight, right?
I think that's the most fundamental thing that they're worried about, in the sense lots of especially younger generation who want to have access to crypto, they can't have direct access uh through their bank account because they just don't offer that service.
So instead, they'll have to take the money out from the bank and put that into say Coinbase Robin Hood of the world and be able to start trading uh crypto.
That is a real threat to the business uh before anything else around stable coins because a bank's business is built on its balance sheet and.
And if the deposit sizing is diminishing, that means the balance sheet is decreasing because if they have less deposit, they can give out less loans and less credit out there, and hence it's a balance, right?
So I think in general, the the first principle for any banks, the general thesis is I want to grow my deposits as much as possible, whatever means that might be, because that helped to grow my balance sheet, that helped to create grow more business revenue.
And hence I think that is a fundamental threat to many businesses, many banks, both inside the United States as well as outside.
I think what stablecoin adds is a further interesting uh aspect to all of that, is also especially if you're a bank outside of the United States, you might feel much more threatened today than before because people like Bridge, people like many others are now offering stablecoin financial accounts.
Now, what that really means is basically saying if you're SME, right, small medium-sized business or enterprise, and today you have trouble opening a dollar account in order to conduct like businesses with uh your global customers.
Well, why not instead just have a stablecoin financial account?
And that's really translating into why don't you just have a wallet on chain?
And that wallet on chain uh can start immediately receiving things in USDC, USDT or whatnot.
And you don't need a bank, you don't need your local bank to service that.
You don't need to pay extra fees for it, right?
So I think that becomes an extra new threat, especially to banks outside of the United States, thinking about the power of stablecoin because stable coin is really a dollar story, and that helps to kind of I guess increase the tension in terms of all these sovereignty uh fights, if you will.
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Can I ask you a question that you definitely don't didn't think I was gonna ask you about your time at Visa?
Were you responsible for buying that Crypto Punk in summer 2021?
Oh yeah, uh it was not me directly, but I was certainly involved in that conversation.
And uh yes, it was uh it was the interesting time.
That was like I almost dropped my phone like into a sewer grate when I saw that that I was a big NFT person at an NFT podcast, and I was like, oh my god, like that was insane.
Right.
It was like a blow off top NFT.
I think we still have it.
So yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, you definitely do.
Yeah, it hasn't moved.
Yeah, I just thought about that was that was just a wild thing.
So um, yeah, you're part of the team.
We'll put it that way.
Definitely a lot of street cred for that.
Um, that's really that's really interesting, Catherine.
Kind of the way you're kind of positioning um, you know, the the institutional uh approach and the viewpoint of this.
Uh I I I don't want to run out of time here, so I I want to jump over to RWAs and then I want to finish by asking you about AI as well.
Um, on the RWA side, uh, we've seen Solana's been a leader of of like an on-chain equities derivatives for for a while, right?
And they way, way back I remember Jupiter being one of the first to list that kind of stuff, right?
So you guys have done a great job there.
Is is what other assets do you foresee kind of coming on chain soon?
Like what what we've seen, you know, uh stocks, let's say we've we're seeing uh commodities come on as well, not just on Solana, other places as well.
What what is kind of the next frontier?
What should we look for in the next like six, twelve, twenty-four months as something that's like where that that is a big piece that's going to be coming on chain and people are actively working to do that?
I would say I would look for as illiquid as possible because these things just don't have a venue to trade in today's financial ecosystem.
And I think that per presents like a perfect opportunity for them, all the more reason, right, for them to come on chain.
So whether that's say private credit market, real estate or commodities, that's just a lot less liquid.
I think they might have a much more better experience, uh, just because blockchain represents much more diversified distribution channel for them uh to get, you know, is like a marketplace, right?
The buyer and the sellers is is here.
I think it would be interesting.
So I would say, yeah, those are the things I would expect.
But you know, having said that, I would still continue.
I mean, we've only just started tokenizing uh money market funds, world corporate bonds, whatever that might be.
So that definitely still need to continue to happen.
But even, you know, uh a lot of the more sort of say account receivables, right?
Which is fairly boring things, if you will, because who cares about receivables?
If you're just like an accountant, you might care, but like usually that's not a very tradable financial assets, but you know, somehow that's actually pretty safe.
It's a very short duration, 30 days, 40, 45, whatever that might be.
And it's totally tradable.
So I think there's a lot of like innovations these days to think about how do I structure them, put it on chain, and then create, you know, different uh ways for uh say merchants to borrow against the account receivables, which is really interesting.
And this is the next this is a skill I have to learn for the next bull run.
Last time I had to learn how to trade meme coins and I have to learn how to how to swap these accounts receivable things.
It's too complicated for me.
Uh, but that's cool.
That's good.
I think that that I think that that's also uh you know a good indication too that this stuff's really working, right?
Is that you have things that are not uh these retail tradable silly assets, right?
It's like you have real, real uh illiquid uh things coming on chain, items coming on chain that that are gonna find a market there uh and have a much much broader access.
Is there anything else you can tell us on the RWA side?
Because I feel like it's something that is still quite ambiguous, and you're kind of giving us a dose of reality there, but it's something where I think a lot of people, you know, they go to RWA, the website.xyz or whatever, they look at that, they're like, I don't really understand like what how this is supposed to shape, like like give us, you know, give us like maybe a longer term view of what this looks like in like five or ten years, help us visualize what this adoption actually looks like.
Because I think for people day-to-day, it's still kind of hard to understand that.
Yeah, I think I think the problem is right now the type of RWAs available is fairly concentrated.
Again, we only have a few major uh financial institutions essentially tokenizing, as I said before, vanilla type of products, it's not rich enough, right?
For you to think about what does that mean for you.
I do think it's a very long-term vision, at least what I think is interesting through uh RWA, and many people have used the term democratizing, you know, the access to a lot of these uh investment vehicles.
I think ultimately it comes back to personal finance.
If you think about the fact that if in the future for you to construct your own individualized uh portfolio management, right, and you might have a very different risk profile from my risk profile, and that entire RWA universe can cater for whatever that might be.
And you might even add agents to help to tailor that or manage your portfolio on a day-to-day level, as and when the uh the risk factor changes.
So to me, it's more about once you have a very rich universe of different uh type of um real world assets, different yields, different duration, different risk factors, all of these are available for you as a many of option.
You then start to have a choice to then make decisions for yourself as well as maybe you know, on behalf of others as you're managing these assets, and to truly think about how does portfolio management or hedge fund could look like in the future.
So that is more like a fundamental transformation, I think, to today's finance because what can you do today?
You can invest in some ETFs, maybe some active things, but it's fairly limited to the the space you have.
But you know, the whole point about bringing everything on chain is then you can start investing into even SpaceX.
Well, if it's IPO, I guess it's easier, but you know, to to things that are private, right?
That's going back to the private credit side of things.
So I think that opens up the space, but we're definitely not there yet.
So once we get to that, I think tipping point, then you start to think about what it means for you.
And this to me is more about personal finance.
The last thing I want to wrap up on uh Catherine is talk about AI.
There's it's almost impossible to have any conversation personal or professional right now without talking about AI.
And um, you know, we have an AI podcast as well, and we just both shows bleed into each other.
We just end out on the AI, we start talking about crypto and crypto, we start talking about AI.
And it's something that um, you know, we've foreseen that crossover coming for a long time.
I want to understand what how is uh what what's going on in AI and Solana?
It's something where it's like I have trouble kind of uh tracking the on-chain AI advancements, let's say, but maybe you can kind of tell us what's what's new on Solana on the AI side uh in terms of anything protocols, adoption, uh developments, anything, please.
We are I would say we as a chain are actually winning on the AI race, which is really exciting to see.
We have a whole team dedicated to building AI and integration with all these protocols.
So uh, firstly, we're protocol agnostic, right?
So we are integrated into X402.
We just announced being a member of the X402 Foundation, and also when Tempo release MPP, the uh the machine payments protocol, uh immediately within the six with a within the day of uh uh of announcement, we've already started integrating into MPPN, uh share the the open source uh GitHub repo uh for everyone to use.
Um so I would say we're we're doing really good job.
And again, why would agents be trading on Solana?
One thing going back to the fundamental of why Solana is a good blockchain to begin with, it is fast, it's cheap, it's scalable.
As I said, that applies to every single different use cases.
Um, and agentic payments is is is not an exception.
I think the second thing is also just the the true power of Solana is that ecosystem, is the the richness of what you have on this network that makes it usable.
It's almost thinking about Solana as being a marketplace, right?
You have sellers and buyers, so you have wallet providers, but you also have different protocols or different applications available.
It has a lot more interesting things for any agent to make use of.
So we'll continue to do a lot of work to bring more sort of AI native kind of companies onto Solana to start building on Solana, but that's the most critical path, I think for us, is to really focus on our ecosystem to invest in these new startups, wherever that might be, and to just create that right environment for agents to actually be useful on this network.
So is that is that kind of I I think people will probably want to know like what's kind of the competitive mode against something like Ethereum.
I mean, on the surface, it definitely it's definitely like the faster transactions and features as well.
Is there anything else we should know in terms of kind of how that race is shaping out on your end?
Yeah, I I mean there's so many different things to think about.
Uh like Ethereum is is not even part of the the discussion in agentic payments, right?
Right now, I think we'll see how Temple does, but you know, you have BASE obviously together with X42, but you know, X42, which is very interesting.
We actually overtook base in terms of the actual uh the agentic payments volumes.
Uh so now we have the number one chain, and and then there's base and then this polygon also doing doing good job in terms of doing that.
Ethereum is I think they suffer from just the the low throughput, to be honest, uh, when it comes to like uh use cases that really demands the the sort of the high performance nature of things.
Um I also just said that you know in terms of how we are thinking about the entire direction of travel for Solana as a whole it's about finance.
It's about financial applications, whatever that might be.
And hence I think we have a pretty razor focused agenda in mind as we're thinking about uh helping different startups, founders to really grow in this ecosystem.
And I think the other thing is also just the fact that it's been battle tested right and it has both the richness of having the retail liquidity and as well as the institutional side we have people like JP Morgan, Western Union, Pfizer all interacting directly on Solana and I I think the good news is also increasingly we're not there to just do the cold calling if you will just to convince them why do you need to build on Solana actually a lot of the time these bigger institutions they come to Solana they they already made up their mind they want to understand a few more kind of much more focus on the technical side about how to implement things.
Uh, and I think that's a very healthy side in terms of the overall growth growth for Solana.
Got it.
Okay, great, great answers, Catherine.
Uh, we'll wrap up there and thank you for giving us an insider insight.
We don't really have people from the chains often at all.
And I don't never even talk to anybody from Solana.
So it's it's great to meet you and and thank you for coming on and giving it telling us all the kind of slightly insider or if not insider, just kind of uh good details about how Solana is kind of you know, uh staying competitive and being a part of the huge phase that's coming next.
Right.
And and I think I should call out one thing that is actually my product that we just shipped uh last week.
So it's called Solana Developer Platform.
Uh check it out.
It's SDP Solana Developer Platform.
It is a uh a platform entirely designed for enterprise and financial institutions to use.
Everything is API driven.
So you as an enterprise, you don't need to learn about Rust or learn about SVM or anything of that sort.
Everything is given in a box, and you can do issuance, you can do payments, and soon enough you can do trading all within this.
Um, and we built it together with our ecosystem, right?
We currently have 23 different infra providers, uh, all the leading ones that supports enterprise institutional grade infrastructures into it, and we are very actively expanding uh the different use cases um and services.
So, yeah.
How how can I use this?
I'm but a simple podcaster.
Is this meant for me, or is this meant it was just meant for for uh perhaps a more dev focused person or institution?
So for now, it's for is really serving the web to the Trat File of the world.
It's I I call them the Solana Curious uh type of clients uh that really want to build on Solana, but you know, there's a lot of bottlenecks uh when it comes to technical side, uh, and hence we want to make it as seamless as easy for them to really start building and iterating on those ideas.
What do you want them to build?
What specifically do you want them to build?
What do you see?
What do you want to see this product spawn?
I mean, it could be anything on the uh, you know, issuing a compliant uh tokenized equity, issuing a genius compliant stablecoin if they want, uh, all the way to doing payment orchestrations, uh on on ramping, off-ramping, lots of cross-border remittance flows.
And very soon enough, as I said, once we have the trading, you can do uh swaps, on-chain effects, vaults, et cetera.
So all these things would be super cool to have.
Love that.
Right on.
Okay.
Well, any aspiring, any anybody who's Solana Curious, this is your moment.
Go check it out.
It's uh, I guess it's Solana.com slash solutions slash SDP.
So congrats on that launch, Catherine.
Uh, and we'll keep watching and it's been a great conversation.
So thank you for coming on.
Yeah, really enjoyed it.
Thank you so much for having me.
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