# Solana Infrastructure And Regulatory Clarity Drive Crypto Adoption

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-08-12

## Transcript

Lucas Bruder, who's our CEO, and Zahner, who's our CTO, both who co-founded JITO, really believe in the actual market structure of Solana.
Of course, Gito is an important part of that, but they understand how Solana works so well.
And so they really believe that the future of markets can be here.
The Clarity Act did not get a vote in the Senate before summer recess, but does that mean that the bill is dead?
And when will we finally get a firm yes or no on this bill?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that recess is a great time for two things, kickball and calling your senator to tell them to stand with crypto.
I'm your host, John Gill, and today is...
Wednesday, August 12th.
Today, we are joined by Rebecca Reitig.
Rebecca is the chief legal officer and chief operating officer at Gito Labs, where she oversees legal compliance and policy strategy for the massive Solana ecosystem infrastructure company that's focused on staking and validation for the network.
Rebecca is totally awesome, and she's going to share a ton of Solana wisdom with us today.
So if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
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But for now, welcome to the Milk Road Show.
Rebecca, how are you?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
I'm really glad to get you on the show today.
I wanted to start with the Clarity Act.
I feel like you've been doing a lot of interviews about this and sharing a lot of great insights.
Yeah, exactly.
But everyone in crypto is very frustrated.
The bill did not get a vote.
It seems like it might be dead.
Do you think that there is still a chance that this bill passes or is this really like, you know, we should give up all hope on this?
There's definitely a chance it passes, right?
We've seen it was noticed on a motion to proceed that will be voted on September 15th, supposedly, when everybody is back from...
summer break, I guess, August recess.
And there's a lot of work going on, continuing on behind the scenes right now in DC.
So you have now that.
is both positive and negative.
You have the industry doing a lot of work for the things it wants, including to see this bill passed.
You also have detractors, whether it be small community banks or law enforcement groups or others who may want to see big changes made to the bill before they'll be able to be supportive of it and their constituents of all sorts of different.
types of senators.
And so you have a lot of different people working at cross purposes.
But I guess to make the bill the best they think it will be or the best it can be before it really goes up for a more substantive vote and not just a procedural vote.
So certainly I didn't know if we were going to get into the everyone's favorite question is always like, Polly Market says, Kalshi says, like, what is your assessment?
It was hovering at...
35% for a really long time.
And I think 35% is pretty high to see a bill pass in DC.
It's very, very hard to get legislation passed.
And obviously, this is very contentious and for a lot of different groups, both traditional and crypto native.
So, you know, maybe I've seen it drop a little bit, but the momentum has not stopped.
I've heard you say in prior interviews that a bill in Washington, D.C.
dies nine times before it finally passes.
Could you elaborate a little bit on what that means and why it is so common for any legislation going through Congress to seemingly die over and over before it ever finally gets to be a law?
I mean, I think this is true for a number of different reasons.
One, there are always competing priorities, right?
Like, I know that's shocking that crypto is not the only thing going on in D.C., but, you know, we have a lot of a lot of really difficult geopolitical issues going on right now that are taking precedence.
We also have a lot of national issues that the president has put forward that he really cares about in Congress.
We have, you know, we've seen the attorney general come up for a vote.
We've seen other big roles.
cabinet positions come up for votes.
So there are so many competing interests at all time within the Senate and the House and things like that.
And then you also have competing interests, as we sort of talked about a moment ago, with respect to the bill itself.
You have community banks, you have large banks.
Now you have a lot of TradFi players coming in and saying they want it, but you also have law enforcement saying they want other things.
You have constituents in many different places.
You have...
The tribes in Nevada saying they want something special for prediction markets in here.
So even seeing a bill try to come forward, people use their leverage at all sorts of different ways and at different times.
And so I think that that's really why you have so many things going on, both.
in the narrow sense and in the larger sense.
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This SEC and this chairman of the SEC are much different than the prior administrations.
They have rushed into the gap here once this bill did not get a vote to sort of like step up and try to bring forth regulatory clarity such that they can.
And I'm curious your thoughts on those efforts because Project Crypto has been this collaboration between the SEC and the CFTC to sort of give the market the clarity at once.
Do you think that's been effective?
Do you think they've done enough?
And just what are you seeing coming out of these conversations and the leadership from the SEC here?
That's a great question.
in terms of rushing in to fill the gap, I assume you mean that there is, there's a meeting coming up, an open meeting coming up that is referring to the fact that there may be a rule coming out with respect to selling certain types of investment contracts.
relating to crypto assets or digital assets.
That is part of what I think we've heard about being part of the innovation exemption, at least in some way, shape or form.
So I think that the SEC was very much letting Congress and the White House really run their process and procedure as they've seen it go forward.
With respect to the Clarity Act, there were so many different and competing interests.
They didn't want to distract from that.
I do think even if a rulemaking comes out on how you could sell tokens as part of an investment contract, which would be a security in compliance with the U.S.
securities laws, they will be able to move that around and modify that.
if the Clarity Act comes out as well.
So I think they were just leaving a little space for all the air in the room to be focused on clarity.
And now that there's a little breather, they will step in, as you said, fill the void with something that they had been working on for a long time, and that was ready.
And I think, you know, depending on what happens with Clarity, we may see additional work, or we will see additional work from the SEC as it relates to tokenized securities.
Can they trade in decentralized platforms, you know, AMMs, Prop AMMs?
There's a lot more that we're going to see from the SEC and I think from the CFTC in terms of Project Crypto and from a larger innovation perspective.
Gotcha.
OK, so there's more to watch for there.
You did an interview recently with outgoing SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, and you asked her what what she wanted people to take away from her tenure there.
And her answer was amazing.
She said.
The importance of letting people try things was the most important thing she wanted the markets to remember her for.
And I'm curious how this actually ties back to who's trying what in the markets, because it seems like institutions are going to keep building in crypto no matter what.
But some of the smaller players, startups and small projects are the ones that are going to suffer from not getting the clarity.
Could you tell me more about your thoughts on that framing and who's going to be allowed to try what in this environment here?
I actually think that crypto native.
So I think that banks.
and traditional players will benefit from Clarity because it will put crypto, which has been innovating at such a rapid pace over the last decade, on par with where the traditional financial institutions are.
And they will all have the same set of rules that we have to comply with.
So in many ways, I think Clarity is certainly going to be beneficial to put guardrails and contours and real meat on the bones of Clarity, no pun intended, for what the industry has been asking for a long time.
It obviously future-proofs the industry in a very particular way.
But I think the industry has been so risk-on in terms of innovation and thinking about where the financial markets are going that...
I think the smaller players may actually be okay too, as you said, because of what Clarity touches.
It touches centralized actors, whether it be exchanges, brokers, and the like, puts out a registration regime for them.
It also deals with token sales.
We're going to see that one way or the other, whether it comes through Clarity or the SEC or both of them together.
So smaller players who are continuing to innovate in a decentralized or more innovative manner are still going to be able to move forward as well.
Okay.
Well, there's a lot of hopeful things in this conversation already.
I'm an optimist.
What can I tell you?
But look, I think the thing everybody should take away is that clarity is also good for TradFi.
It really is.
Because if you're talking about all the experimentation, we've seen them.
doing, it will allow them to move even faster.
And they've put some resources in right now.
But I can tell you from private conversations I've had, I think banks will pour in even more resources into their own innovation if they see clarity really moving forward.
So, you know, we will have to contend with the traditional financial system building the same types of things we are.
I'm looking forward to contending with them.
September 15th is when the next vote in the Senate will be on this.
So we'll be watching there.
Rebecca, I want to get some questions in about Solana and what you guys are doing at Gito.
But just to start with the Solana ecosystem at a high level, they keep building, they keep shipping.
But sentiment and performance of price action has maybe not, let's say, just been dislocated, right?
And I'm curious your thoughts on this.
How is your...
What is your outlook on the Solana ecosystem overall and the Sol token here?
Just give me an updated view of your thoughts on Solana at this moment.
I think the most amazing thing about Solana right now is we're seeing transaction volume and use of the network really going back up.
We've seen that even over the last few weeks that the transaction volume has gone very high, including...
off centralized players and much more into the decentralized DEXs and prop AMMs and things like that.
And Solana was really built for that, right?
The phrase was always internet capital markets, and it was really meant for traders and for people who wanted to see their transactions move quickly, the volume of transactions move quickly.
And so we've seen a lot of that.
of late.
To your point about it not being correlated with price, I don't know if we know yet.
You know, the idea around the stock markets, the historically was that they're efficient markets and they incorporate information and, you know, very quickly.
And I don't know if that's true of the crypto markets yet.
Right.
Sometimes people will say, like, well, why is a token trading down today?
And I'm like, it's a day that ends in why, you know, like, I don't know because it's Tuesday.
So I don't think we have.
I don't think these markets work in the same way where you're incorporating information.
about utility into the way tokens work.
I think we're going to see an evolution of how tokens work in this next phase of crypto, in this next era, right?
Of things that have nine lives, certainly it is crypto too.
So, you know, I think this is a new era and we're seeing new things get built.
Some of those relate to tokens and you can correlate action and price and some of those don't.
So I think there's going to be a real movement around that.
whether it be price movement or demand or things.
Well, like I said, a lot of people have been asking you questions about clarity because you're the chief legal officer at Gito Labs, but you also wear a lot of other hats over there too.
And I'm curious if you could just tell us a little bit for those who maybe aren't super familiar with what Gito is and why it's such an important part of the Solana ecosystem, just a little bit about the project and what you guys do at Gito.
Yeah, so our CEO, Lucas Bruder, put out maybe a few months ago something called the Market Layer Manifesto.
And it was really about how Gito operates at many different layers of the Solana ecosystem.
And our next evolution...
which I'll talk about at the end, was really getting up to the consumer layer or the trading layer.
So the first thing Gito built that was very successful was something called the Gito Block Engine.
It's really about how to move transactions for a very high throughput chain.
back to settlement, finality, all of those things efficiently, very, very quickly, and making sure that you can actually get your transactions landed quickly.
And that really changed the trajectory of how Solana worked and how transactions could be landed on Solana.
The next thing that Gito built that was very successful was the Gito stake pool, which was the largest stake pool on Solana.
There's a liquid staking token, or as the SEC calls them, staking receipts.
tokens called GitoSoul.
And that's been incorporated in an ETF already in a 1940 fund, not in one of the more grantor trusts that we've seen.
And but that really increased stake and the way people would stake on Solana, which was part of the inherent structure of how the chain was going to work.
So those two were really big parts of moving Solana forward in the inherent ways and in the inherent nature it was supposed to be built and really building out the market layer.
And then the next thing that we launched very recently is something called JTX, which is a fully non-custodial on-chain trading interface or.
you know, exchange, but a trading interface, for lack of a better word, that is really meant to give you a lot of certainty.
It's all the things that Gito has built out over time.
Certainty, trust, real seriousness in how you go about thinking about trading assets and...
interacting with all different sorts of assets.
So there will be lots of different things on the roadmap that'll be built out over time.
And so really building out this market layer that is on top of, but also incorporated in Solana is really where Gito sits.
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I'm using, candidly, I'm using the liquid staking token as well.
I think enormous amount of institutional players have chosen Jito's soul for their staking solutions as well.
And I'm curious what you have seen or what your thoughts are on what's driving that institutional adoption.
What's helped you guys get traction in those markets?
I think that we put...
We were the first private company to go in and see the crypto task force in February of 2025.
And our first order of business was about incorporating liquid staking tokens and ETFs.
And in some of our conversations, we got feedback.
This was obviously now, this feels so long ago and almost outdated given where we are with all the information we've gotten from the SEC.
But there was a lot of questions about are any liquid staking tokens or these staking receipt token securities?
And we took the initiative to put out a securities classification report explaining why JITO sold.
was not a security.
And we also put out reports about taxation and how you deal with liquid staking tokens.
And so we've really taken the steps that institutions need to feel by putting out a lot of thought leadership for better or worse, as I've learned from being in crypto for so long.
The legal and compliance part of things is part of the sales for any of where you are in crypto.
And so really taking the steps to answer questions that institutions either had privately and asked us or have been saying publicly or that we knew were going to exist, I think has helped a lot on that.
We also have had great people leading the charge here.
Our prior chief commercial officer, Tom.
did a lot of great work, our head of institutional growth, who also leads product for JTX.
Kevin Beardsley is doing a lot of good work.
And so I think being a serious team, answering serious questions in a way that institutions are used to and comfortable with really has helped move things forward with respect to Gito Soul.
But there are still, look, the SEC has a novel ETF.
rulemaking out there where they've asked for feedback.
So we'll be responding to that about why liquid staking tokens are good in ETFs.
And we also just saw updated rules for NASDAQ, NYSEA, and the CBOE for listing certain types of ETFs.
And they said you can have 15% of an other digital commodity other than the spot commodity in some of these types of things.
And we think that Gitosol meets that definition as well.
So, you know, I think we're not done seeing innovations around ETFs as it relates to liquid staking tokens.
So you are following the rules closely and bringing something to market that complies with that and the market's rewarding that.
And I think that's an important thing to call out.
So thank you for that.
I want to talk about JTX because...
Yeah, I just got to get some more information on this.
So, okay, this is a, as you said, a self-custodial platform for trading.
And this gives access to a lot of the infrastructure Jito has been building for institutions directly to retail.
Talk to me about this trading platform.
Why did you guys decide to bring this to market?
What makes it stand out from other solutions that are already on the market?
And just tell me a little bit more about how to think about this platform.
I think that there are two parts to this.
I think Lucas Bruder, who's our CEO, and Zahner, who's our CTO, both who co-founded JITO, really believe in the...
actual market structure of Solana.
Of course, Gito is an important part of that, but they understand how Solana works so well.
And so they really believe that the future of markets can be here and are on the chain, right?
The way that the block engine has been built and the Gito stake pool was built was pretty innovative and really true to the ethos of crypto.
And so I think they wanted to bring that to the consumer layer too.
I think the other thing that Gito has been synonymous with is really building out.
And I think Lucas and Zana are very much viewed like this in the Solana ecosystem and beyond as really honest brokers, trustworthy players.
And I think a lot of people have been going the custodial route because people are used to that, right?
Banks hold your money.
So having somebody else hold the keys over your crypto is somewhat familiar.
And I think we wanted to build the same type of experience on Solana in a...
decentralized, fully on-chain, fully non-custodial way that gave people the same types of assurances and the same types of comfortability that they have with centralized players, but, you know, on Solana in a non-custodial way.
Awesome.
Okay.
Now, I think a question a lot of our audience always has is where does the tokens fit into all of this, right?
You've got these products and platforms and all this great infrastructure and design you've built.
How does the JTO token fit into that?
How does the Sol token fit into that?
And what are those relationships there?
Talk to me about that.
Great question.
So we've been very public about how JTX and JTO will work together.
80% of all fees generated on JTX will go to the Dow or to the token.
And for a treasury there, I think the other thing that has been...
That's been something that Gito has done very, very consistently, which is ensure that there is massive community alignment with the token and made that very clear.
So even when fees were split on the block engine for a period of time, Gito then directed all fees to the DAO.
Obviously, there are fees from Gito Sol that go to the DAO.
And so there's a really robust DAO treasury that really is meant for the token.
There also is going, we've been very public with a proposal.
that's gone to the DAO about using fees to burn JTO and sort of a buy back and burn program.
And so I think that the token alignment is very public, very clear, and it doesn't leave a lot of questions for token holders where, to your point, people usually ask like, oh, well, what's going to happen with this new product?
And, you know, are you going to take fees?
And then is it going to be directed to the equity?
And I think that Lucas has been very, very thoughtful about making it very clear that there was always going to be alignment with token holders.
Awesome.
Okay.
I think that people love to hear that.
Final question on this.
We talked about legal compliance regulation.
We've also talked about a lot of the innovation and new things that Gito is doing.
You kind of wear multiple hats at the firm.
How do you think about helping Gito balance between regulatory compliance and making sure you're crossing your T's, dotting your eyes on that, but also pushing innovation forward and continuing to bring new things to market?
How do you navigate that?
I would say that Gito is at the forefront of responsible innovation.
And one of the reasons that I think people trust Gito is that, as I said, Lucas Anzano and our head of foundation, Brian Smith, are very straight shooters, very honest brokers.
I think the very...
a lot of transparency around alignment with the token holders also really enhances that trust.
So for me, this is a very heavy engineering org, given everything we're building.
We are primarily engineers, although we do really keep growing in all sorts of exciting ways and think about optimizing workflows in all sorts of exciting ways too, but really letting people innovate and just making sure that everything is sort of...
tied up on the margins without making, you know, people really made legal and regulatory the main character for so long.
Now, in many ways, during the prior administration, you felt like you had to do that.
But I think that especially if you're doing things in a non-custodial manner, in an on-chain manner, and there's a lot of transparency, including with good terms of service, good privacy policy, you know, lots of disclosures, you're doing the things that people really need to make sure that they have assurances and help.
and the products they're using and the markets they want to participate in.
Rebecca, I know you have a call, so I will let you go.
I have one more question about this.
Just tell me a little bit about the roadmap.
You guys at Gito have built so much great infrastructure and different solutions at the validator and staking level.
Now there's this exchange.
What's on the roadmap?
What's on the horizon for you all?
I think continuing to build out JTX so it has every type of asset that anybody would want to trade and participate in, and they can do it in an on-chain way that makes a lot of sense.
And as we talked about, it has a lot of alignment with the ecosystem and is really where we're going.
We obviously want to build out novel ways to think about trading on-chain equities.
There are lots of people, you know, in terms of the issuer side who are doing that, but ensuring that users really can do it from a price transparency.
perspective, from a low slippage perspective, and have a lot of customer choice or user choice around assets.
So, you know, a lot of different platforms only integrate XYZ, only in XYZ as an example, right?
Like, but, you know, only integrate certain types of things is one way that we want to make sure that there is a lot of choice around users being able to participate.
in the platform and use the types of assets and trade the types of assets that they want.
So it should be very fun to watch get built out over time.
And I am bullish this team.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
Look, I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
I know you're very important.
You've got another important call to jump to, so we'll cut this short.
But I do hope we can have you back on to catch up again, because I'm really excited about what you all are building there.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
You can definitely check me out on Twitter, Rebecca Reddick1.
I'm there.
And I don't post a ton, but I hopefully post when it's important.
And you can find out all about Gito on Twitter as well.
And I'm also on LinkedIn for any boomers who may be listening to your show as well.
But my DMs are open and always happy to chat with people with any questions because, you know, I think the regulatory side of things takes continues to take precedence in people's mind.
I think anybody working in crypto today or even thinking about getting back into it will always have a question about regulation and how it will impact their life and their work.
So love to help people whenever I can make them feel comfortable about what they're building because, you know, that's what we're here for.
Rebecca Reitig, CLO, COO at Gito Labs.
Thank you so much for being on The Milk Road Show.
Thanks so much for having me.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
Hopefully next time we can have a longer conversation because I have a lot more questions about Gito and Solana.
But thanks for being here, everyone.
And we'll see you on the next episode of The Millcroach Show.
Thanks.
Bye.
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