The Solana Foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan, who spent three years as Binance’s global chief marketing officer, as its chief strategy officer, and named Polygon Labs’ Jamal Raees as general manager of payments, Decrypt reported on Sept 24. Both recruits arrive from other crypto firms, part of an effort to build a senior team aimed at institutional adoption and payments on the network.
Conlan’s brief covers institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market, the Foundation said. Before Binance she held senior roles at the exchange OKX, the sports agency CAA Sports and the advertising group Havas. Raees joins from Polygon Labs and has previously worked at the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and the payments company Wyre.
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The hires follow a run of partnership announcements. Cointelegraph reported that San Francisco fintech Modern Treasury will become a payments infrastructure partner in the Foundation’s newly launched Solana Developer Platform, and that Solana signed with Amazon Web Services this year to support stablecoin payments while expanding existing work with Mastercard and Western Union.
Key facts
- Rachel Conlan joins as chief strategy officer after three years as Binance’s global CMO; Jamal Raees becomes general manager of payments from Polygon Labs, reported by Decrypt.
- Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026, with real-world assets on the network passing $4.5 billion and tokenized equity supply crossing $620 million, per foundation figures.
- Solana’s third of four planned slot-time reductions took effect last week, cutting the target slot time to 250 milliseconds, a nearly 17% speedup.
- Michael Coates joined as chief information security officer earlier this year from Mozilla and Twitter.
- Crypto.news reported that Solana attracted roughly $348 million in net distributed real-world asset flows over a 30-day period measured in early September.
Institutional finance and payments get separate leaders
The Foundation framed the shift as a “Token Supercycle,” its term for the migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure, and the basis for what it calls Internet Capital Markets. Solana developers set out a roadmap under that banner in July 2025.
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Conlan said the builders’ ambition and existing usage drew her to the role, adding that her work would include helping businesses move from interest toward implementation, according to Crypto.news. Raees said payments are one of the clearest areas where blockchain infrastructure is moving from promise to production, and that his emphasis would be greater adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with a focus on global markets, per Cointelegraph.
Crypto.news traced the track record the appointments build on: tokenized products on Solana from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, VanEck, Circle, Ondo Finance and WisdomTree; Ondo Finance bringing hundreds of tokenized U.S. stocks and exchange traded funds to the network earlier this year; and SBI Global Asset Management partnering with DigiFT to launch a tokenized Japanese equity fund in July. Separately, the Foundation joined SBI R3 Japan alongside SBI Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group in July, while its SBI work expanded into tokenized securities.
On the payments side, Crypto.news reported that the Foundation launched a developer platform for financial institutions in March, with Mastercard, Western Union and Worldpay among early users; that MoneyGram later became a Solana validator and joined the same platform; and that in May the Foundation and Google Cloud rolled out Pay.sh, a gateway letting AI agents pay for individual API requests with stablecoins through a Solana wallet. Cointelegraph added that Mastercard and Western Union collaborations were expanded this year.
Why it matters
The appointments place two pieces of Solana’s business — institutional finance and payments — under dedicated senior leadership at a time when the Foundation is also rebuilding the network underneath. If the institutional and stablecoin activity the Foundation cites continues, Conlan and Raees will be the executives responsible for converting it into signed partners and production payment flows rather than pilots. Crypto.news noted that Alpenglow, a planned network upgrade, is intended to cut transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, and that the faster finality remains a target for the upgrade.
What to watch
The fourth planned slot-time reduction is not yet dated, and Alpenglow’s finality figure is still a target rather than a shipped result. The Foundation’s trading module for its developer platform carries a planned release later in 2026. Measurements of Solana’s stablecoin volume, real-world assets and tokenized equity supply in coming quarters will show whether the institutional push is producing activity at scale.
This article is not financial advice, and crypto and tokenized-asset markets are volatile and uncertain.
Sources: Decrypt, Crypto.news, Cointelegraph
