Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Catherine Gu on her path from hedge fund quant to the Solana Foundation

"I started as a quant in the city of London, working in a hedge fund...what really drove me to crypto in general is the technology shift...you’re just seeing all the technology changing in a very clear direction, especially younger people who started in finance around the 2010s beginning to question if the norm will always be that way or whether there’s a new chance to rewrite history.

For me, I think that’s really what it means to be part of the crypto ecosystem, because ultimately it is about finance. Whether we like to admit it or not, it is about replicating the existing financial infrastructure in many different ways, but we have a chance for the first time to define what it should be and how to improve it in a way that maybe traditionally, because of legacy systems and costs, has just been too difficult to do."

–Catherine Gu on the Blockworks @LightspeedpodHQ podcast


Watch the full interview:
youtu.be/6RCgvwdjrZE?si=yKnMXkA-82xIwDzU