Key points

  • Rachel Conlan was named chief strategy officer after serving as Binance's global chief marketing officer.
  • Jamal Raees became general manager of payments after roles at Polygon Labs, Bridge and Wyre.
  • The appointments target institutional partnerships and payment adoption, but they do not change the Solana protocol.

The Solana Foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments, adding two industry veterans as the nonprofit expands its focus on institutional adoption and blockchain-based payments. The Foundation announced the hires on Thursday, September 24, describing them as part of a wider effort to connect companies and financial institutions with infrastructure built on the Solana network.

Two distinct mandates

Conlan will oversee strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market work. She joins after three years at Binance, where she served as global chief marketing officer, and previously held senior positions at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas. Raees will work with payment companies, enterprises and ecosystem participants to broaden the use of Solana as payments infrastructure. He most recently worked at Polygon Labs and earlier held roles at Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company now owned by Stripe, and crypto payments firm Wyre.

Related reporting: SoFi moves $25 billion card program to stablecoin settlement

Institutional finance is the target

The appointments divide the Foundation's institutional push between broad strategy and a dedicated payments function. CoinDesk reported that Solana is increasingly courting traditional financial firms as stablecoins, tokenized funds, equities and other real-world assets become a larger part of the network's pitch. In practical terms, Conlan's role centers on partnerships and adoption, while Raees is tasked with helping payment businesses evaluate and use the network for moving money. The move is organizational rather than technical: it does not introduce a protocol upgrade, alter token economics or itself guarantee new institutional deployments.

Scale figures need attribution

The Foundation said Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume during 2026. It also put the value of real-world assets on the network above $4.5 billion and tokenized equity supply above $620 million. CoinDesk separately cited Allium, RWA.xyz and Blockworks data for broadly similar measures, including more than $5 trillion of stablecoin volume and about $4.5 billion of tokenized assets. Those figures describe activity and asset value tracked on the network; they should not be read as revenue for the Foundation or as a forecast of future adoption.

What the hires signal

The Foundation's choice of executives with experience spanning major exchanges, payments companies and competing blockchain ecosystems signals an effort to translate technical capacity into commercial relationships. It also places payments leadership alongside a broader strategy office instead of treating payment use cases as a secondary ecosystem function. The hires come as public blockchains compete to host stablecoin settlement and tokenized securities, areas that require more than transaction speed: institutions also consider compliance, reliability, liquidity, custody and integration costs. The effectiveness of the new structure will therefore be measured by integrations and sustained usage, not by appointments or headline network metrics alone.

What comes next

Conlan is expected to coordinate how the Foundation presents Solana to institutions and supports companies moving from evaluation to implementation. Raees will focus more narrowly on payment providers and enterprises building transfer and settlement products. The announcement did not name specific customers, launch dates or transaction targets. That leaves the near-term impact uncertain, while giving the Foundation clearer leadership for two priorities it says are already moving from experimentation toward production.

Sources

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