Background & Biography
Rettig’s professional formation was in litigation rather than blockchain engineering. Cravath’s Summer 2026 alumni interview identifies her legal education at Columbia Law School and records periods as a litigation associate between 2006 and 2017. She subsequently worked with blockchain and cryptocurrency businesses in private practice, including as a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Her later in-house roles brought that experience into companies building software for markets whose participants may not have a conventional contractual relationship with a single operator.
Aave Companies was an important stage in that transition. Its general-counsel role combined legal responsibilities with engagement on decentralized-finance policy, as contemporaneous professional biographies record. Polygon then appointed Rettig its first chief policy officer in early 2023, with a remit covering global policy and explaining its technology to policymakers. Bloomberg Law independently reported the move from Aave. She later became Polygon Labs’ chief legal and policy officer, the title used in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s 2024 conference materials.
Jito Labs announced her appointment as chief legal officer on January 16, 2025, effective January 20. The developer assigned her responsibility for its legal, compliance and policy functions in the United States and abroad. Jito Foundation’s April roundup, published on May 1, 2026, identified her as both CLO and COO when describing her April media appearances; Cravath’s Summer 2026 alumni publication and a September TRM interview also confirm the dual role. Jito Labs and Jito Foundation are distinct organizations, so her current executive position belongs to the Labs company even when a Foundation publication discusses her work.
Her U.S. professional focus is supported by her public professional profile and repeated work with U.S. regulatory institutions. The international dimension concerns the systems and policy questions she works on, rather than a claim that she is professionally based in every market where those systems operate. In the Cravath interview, she described an in-house remit encompassing data protection, contracts, money transmission and sanctions as well as policy. The operational title therefore adds an important dimension to a biography that might otherwise reduce her work to public advocacy.
Notable Contributions
Rettig co-authored “Genuine DeFi as Critical Infrastructure” with Michael Mosier and Katja Gilman. The work first circulated in 2024 and was published in the Journal of Financial Regulation in 2025. Its central contribution was a framework for addressing illicit finance without assuming that every decentralized protocol functions like a traditional intermediary. The authors proposed distinguishing systems with independent controlling actors from genuinely decentralized infrastructure, coordinating security through a critical-infrastructure approach and applying additional risk-management obligations to certain businesses involved in communicating transactions.
The proposal is significant because it tries to identify where an obligation could practically operate, rather than stopping at a general call for lighter regulation. DLA Piper’s separate analysis discussed both its critical-infrastructure analogy and the limits of relying on security coordination alone. That makes the paper useful as a concrete position in a policy debate, with identifiable assumptions and mechanisms to scrutinize. It does not establish that Treasury has adopted its recommendations, that the authors’ classification is legally conclusive or that a protocol is exempt from financial-integrity requirements.
Her Jito work produced another identifiable policy contribution in early 2025. A January 29 memorandum co-authored with Multicoin Capital’s Greg Xethalis, prepared for a February 5 SEC meeting, proposed ways to incorporate staking into crypto exchange-traded products. It described direct staking of part of a product’s assets and an alternative involving liquid-staking tokens. The practical issues included reflecting the underlying network’s economics while preserving the ability to meet redemptions. This was a joint industry submission, not an SEC product approval or evidence that one lawyer determined the agency’s later position.
The SEC’s June 9, 2025 “DeFi and the American Spirit” roundtable listed Rettig as a Jito Labs participant. The agenda placed her alongside other industry practitioners and academics in a public discussion of decentralized finance. Participation matters as evidence that her analysis entered a formal regulatory forum, but it did not confer government office or policymaking authority. The distinction is particularly important when professional speakers are described as advisers: an opportunity to present views is different from a power to issue rules.
Rettig’s research continued in 2026 with “The Compatibility of Permissionless Networks and Financial Integrity,” co-authored with Omid Malekan and Michael Mosier. Dated August 23 and posted to SSRN the next day, it argues that regulated institutions can operate on open blockchain networks while meeting existing anti-money-laundering and sanctions obligations. Its proposed framework locates controls at the application layer institutions operate, rather than requiring the underlying network to be permissioned. The article should be read as the authors’ legal analysis and operational proposal, with institution-specific assessment still necessary.
Her September 2026 TRM conversation helps explain the connection between those two research projects. Rettig distinguished the underlying network from the applications operating on it and described the aim of producing an actionable framework for institutional legal and compliance teams. That discussion extends her earlier interest in decentralized protocols into questions faced by banks and other regulated firms. It also supplies a useful test for future reporting: whether principles about openness can be translated into controls that an institution can document, operate and defend.
Why Katharos.ai Follows Rebecca Rettig
Katharos.ai follows Rettig because her public record connects three layers that are often discussed separately: the structure of software, the duties of financial-market participants and the daily decisions of a company building infrastructure. Her movement from litigation to policy and operations provides a practical perspective on those connections. The strongest evidence of influence is the work itself: co-authored research, a documented product-policy submission and participation in a regulator’s public forum. We examine their substance rather than treating visibility as proof that a position is correct.
Her work is also relevant to a broader institutional question: which controls belong with a user-facing business and which belong with the infrastructure it uses? That question recurs across her critical-infrastructure research, the 2026 permissionless-network paper and the Jito staking discussion. A useful assessment must preserve each document’s scope and assumptions. Arguments about network access do not settle every issue involving custody, investment products, sanctions exposure or consumer protection, and a technology company’s interests remain part of the context for its advocacy.
Areas to Follow
- Institutional controls: whether proposals for using permissionless networks lead to documented compliance practices, and what regulators say about them. - Staking and investment products: the treatment of liquidity, redemption, disclosures and liquid-staking structures in actual filings and decisions. - DeFi classification: how independent control, user interfaces and infrastructure responsibilities are defined in future policy work. - Operational leadership: how Rettig’s combined COO and CLO responsibilities develop as Jito Labs builds and supports infrastructure.
Reporting Scope
This profile covers verified professional activity and public contributions, checked on October 6, 2026. Historical Aave and Polygon positions are distinguished from her current Jito Labs role, and joint work is credited to its named co-authors. Academic publication and appearance on a government agenda establish a record of participation, not official endorsement. This account is not a legal assessment of any reader’s business, nor does it establish the compliance, safety or investment merits of Jito-related products.
Areas of Influence
Policy & Regulation is the primary category, covering decentralized-finance policy, financial integrity, staking and the regulatory treatment of blockchain infrastructure. Community, Media & Education reflects her papers, interviews and public explanations of technical legal questions. Her operational work also connects to Exchanges & Infrastructure, but the emphasis here is on how she interprets and helps formulate the conditions under which infrastructure is built and used. The contributions of engineers, other executives, co-authors and regulators remain distinct.
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