Binance and Polygon Labs veterans take institutional and payments posts as 2026 stablecoin volume tops $5 trillion
The Solana Foundation on Thursday appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. The foundation said the hires strengthen institutional growth and payments leadership as more financial activity moves onto Solana.
Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market work that brings Solana’s infrastructure to the companies and users who will run on it. Raees will work with payment companies, enterprises and the broader ecosystem to expand the adoption and reach of Solana as global payments infrastructure.
The appointments, officials said, reflect a maturing ecosystem and land at what the foundation called a step-change in onchain activity. In 2026 alone, Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume. Real-world assets on the network have surpassed $4.5 billion. Tokenized equity supply has crossed $620 million.
Payments, treasuries, funds and equities are moving beyond experimentation and into production on Solana, operating globally, 24 hours a day.
That shift has a name at the foundation: the Token Supercycle. The phrase covers the long-term migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure. It is the thesis behind Internet Capital Markets, where any asset can be issued, traded and settled natively on the internet, and where market access is defined by connectivity rather than by geography or institutional tier.
Conlan’s job is to turn that thesis into adoption. She joins from Binance, where she spent three years as global chief marketing officer. She previously held senior leadership roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.
“What brought me to Solana was the ambition of the builders and how much it is already being put to use. The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience. That means making the value clear, building the right institutional relationships and helping businesses move from interest to implementation,” Conlan said.
Raees joins from Polygon Labs. He previously held roles at Bridge and Wyre. He is tasked with building on Solana’s existing payments momentum.
“Payments are one of the clearest areas where blockchain infrastructure is moving from promise to production. Solana has the performance, reliability and developer ecosystem to support payments at global scale. Solana has moved beyond crypto into technology for finance, and I’m eager to bring Solana to enterprises and payment companies around the world,” Raees said.
Solana Foundation President Lily Liu tied the appointments to the ecosystem’s growing scale and ambition.
“The Solana ecosystem is growing in both scale and ambition. We’re in the early innings of the Token Supercycle, where all assets and financial activity become native to the internet, enabling markets that are faster, more accessible and always on. Exceptional leaders choose Solana because they want to be close to what’s being built. Rachel brings deep experience translating complex technology into something people actually adopt, while Jamal brings years of experience building payment infrastructure and working with enterprises on the future of money. That is the work in front of us. The question is no longer whether markets move onchain — it’s how fast, and onto whose infrastructure,” Liu said.
The two posts are the latest in a growing number of senior operators choosing to join and build within the Solana ecosystem. Earlier this year, Michael Coates joined the foundation as chief information security officer, bringing senior security expertise from Mozilla and Twitter.
For institutions already running or evaluating treasuries, tokenized funds, equities or payment flows on Solana, the foundation has now named the executives responsible for partnership strategy and payments reach. For teams building those products, the work Conlan and Raees described is the handoff from interest to implementation.