Founding, growing and exiting Catalyst

Context

Catalyst was a cross-chain bridge I co-founded in 2022. We raised $6,600,000 across two rounds, built a 15-person team, shipped two products in production, and reached $50,000,000 volume and 20,000 monthly active users.

After a strategic pivot to serving "altVM" chains (e.g., Solana, Sui), we rebranded our product to CrossCats, the only bridge built for altVMs. The company was then acquired by LI.FI in February 2025, and the tech we built became the foundation for the enterprise payments products I subsequently led there.

My role covered everything from product vision and protocol design to fundraising, hiring, GTM, and the strategic pivot that led to the acquisition.

Problem

The modular infrastructure stack was making it trivially easy to spin up new chains, and after my time at Aave, I believed that the future would have millions of chains, with every app running its own chain optimised for its own gas costs, throughput, and execution model.

The problem was, in that future, three things stop working:

1. Connectivity - a single shared chain gives you access to every other app on it, but your own chain doesn't.
2. Composability - "money legos" weren't possible across different chains.
3. Existing infrastructure - wallets, transaction explorers, indexers, price feeds, network endpoints were all needed for a brand new chain.

Strategic Bet

The consensus in 2022 was to build on Ethereum, where the capital, the users, and the existing developer tooling were. I went the other direction and decided to build infrastructure for the marginal new chain.

We designed Catalyst from first principles around three requirements:

1. New chains should connect automatically the moment they go live.
2. Anyone should be able to open routes between chains without asking permission.
3. The protocol should work across every chain, not just those built on Ethereum's standards.

The GTM strategy was embedding Catalyst into chain deployment toolkits (like what I used at Aave) so that every new chain that launched arrived pre-connected to the Catalyst network from day one.

We built the protocol, API, SDK, and UI, and launched to significant traction. The project grew to over 80,000 followers on Twitter, ran one of the most anticipated testnets in the space with hundreds of millions in testnet volume and hundreds of thousands of users, and hit $50M in mainnet volume with 20,000 monthly active users post-launch.

Pivoting

One year later, traction slowed, and I realised two things: (1) fewer new chains were being deployed than we had originally anticipated, and (2) the larger bridge competitors like LayerZero were slowly expanding to cover the same long-tail of newly launched chains we were targeting - closing the window on our differentiation.

As a result, I ran a comprehensive discovery across dozens of calls with bridge users, chain teams, our chain development kit partners, traders, and enterprise fintechs. I realised that long-tail bridging had become a highly competitive field with relatively undifferentiated products.

I also kept hearing about a different opportunity: non-Ethereum chains (i.e., altVMs). Networks like Solana, Sui, and Movement built on entirely different technical foundations than Ethereum, and were gaining significant traction. However, these chains were effectively islands, ecosystems with real users but with no way to connect to other chains.

Taking this learning, we launched a new product - CrossCats - with an entirely new brand and rebuilt the product to be designed for non-Ethereum ecosystems.

The GTM was to become the canonical bridge for each new altVM chain and being embedded directly into their UI and available through their API and SDK - so that every chain launched with CrossCats as the default way in.

Design

Existing bridging products were utilitarian and forgettable. I wanted CrossCats to feel completely different, Adding and that meant being pixel-perfect about every layer of the stack. I drove the positioning (the only bridge built for non-Ethereum chains), messaging, brand design (working with our designer Diego and animation studios), and product design.

To make CrossCats really memorable, I designed a story-driven universe where each blockchain exists as its own island. At the centre was Cupcakes, an explorer cat, and her sidekick Huevos, travelling from island to island and linking them into a connected network.

Acquisition

In late 2024, LI.FI approached us with an offer to acquire Catalyst. Our initial read was to pass! We had live protocols on mainnet, growing activity across several altVM chains, and real momentum. But after several weeks of sitting with it and meeting their founding team, we got excited at the prospect. With LI.FI's funding, team scale, and enterprise distribution, we knew could build a significantly better product than we could on our own.

LI.FI was aiming to go full-stack and own their own execution. They wanted to expand beyond EVM into Solana and Move chains, and CrossCats had already built the bridging primitives to do that.

The deal closed in February 2025. 90% of the team came over, and the architecture we built became the foundation for the enterprise payments products I now lead.

Reflections

1. Talk to users early and often. I operated for too long on the assumption that protocol elegance would attract usage. Structured discovery was what made the pivot possible, but I could have unearthed those findings earlier.

2. Killing sacred cows earlier. Getting the insight right isn't enough; founders also have to get the timing and the magnitude right too The thousands-of-chains thesis was directionally right, but slower and smaller in magnitude than what I anticipated. I eventually came to admit this to myself, but held on for longer than necessary.

3. Move more deliberately with more speed. There was a small window to become the exclusive bridge for new chains before larger competitors supported them. However, we were too lean and moved too slowly to take advantage of that window. The cost of moving too slowly was higher than the cost of becoming a larger team with more burn.

4. I scaled the team too conservatively, especially on sales. We had a small team and I kept it that way because staying lean felt responsible. In hindsight, the opportunity required a much larger push. A 3-person non-technical team wasn't enough, and I should have gone bolder on headcount and execution capacity.