Solana Foundation Adds Ex-Binance Marketing Chief and Payments Executive to Leadership

The Solana Foundation has named Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. The foundation announced both appointments on Thursday, right after a string of new partnership deals.

Conlan, a former Binance chief marketing officer, will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and efforts to bring more businesses onto Solana. She spent three years at Binance and earlier held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.

Stablecoin and Tokenized Deposit Focus

Raees, who previously worked at Polygon Labs, will deepen ties with major payments companies and work on the infrastructure teams need to build payment services on Solana. He said his focus will be on wider adoption of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, especially in global markets.

Solana Partnerships and Network Growth

The hires follow a busy run of deals. Modern Treasury, a San Francisco fintech, will become a payments infrastructure partner in the newly launched Solana Developer Platform. Earlier this year, Solana signed with Amazon Web Services to support stablecoin payments and expanded its work with Mastercard and Western Union.

Solana is preparing the Alpenglow upgrade, which aims to cut transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds, though that speed is still a target. So far in 2026, the network has handled over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume, holds more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets and has over $620 million in tokenized equity supply.