Solana Foundation Hires Binance's Former Global CMO Rachel Conlan

Solana Foundation announced two leadership hires: Rachel Conlan will lead strategy as chief strategy officer, while Jamal Raees, arriving from Polygon Labs, becomes general manager of payments. Cointelegraph and Decrypt reported the appointments, citing a foundation statement from September 24, and the foundation itself framed the moves as a continuation of building out its institutional team.

Who got the new roles

Conlan spent three years as global CMO of Binance and previously held senior roles at OKX, sports agency CAA Sports and advertising group Havas. At the foundation, she will oversee institutional partnerships, network growth, efforts to bring new companies onto the Solana network, and go-to-market strategy.

Raees joined from Polygon Labs. Before that, he worked at stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and payments company Wyre. At the foundation, he will focus on working with major payment companies and enterprises building settlement infrastructure on the network, naming stablecoins and tokenized deposits in global markets as his priority.

The foundation presents both hires as part of building a senior team focused on institutional adoption and payments. Earlier this year it hired Michael Coates as chief information security officer, who previously worked at Mozilla and Twitter.

Words from the foundation's president

Solana Foundation president Lily Liu commented on both appointments.

"The question is no longer whether markets move onchain, but how fast, and onto whose infrastructure."

- Lily Liu, president of Solana Foundation, statement from September 24, 2026

The foundation calls this shift the Token Supercycle. It's the foundation's own term for the migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure. The foundation frames the process around what it calls Internet Capital Markets. It's a setup where assets are issued, traded and settled online without traditional intermediaries. Solana developers laid out this direction back in July 2025, when they set a goal to rework the network's market structure around the most liquid assets.

Network scale and new partnerships

According to the foundation, stablecoin transaction volume on Solana topped $5 trillion in 2026. Real-world assets on the network passed $4.5 billion, and tokenized equity supply crossed $620 million.

The hires coincided with changes to the network itself. Last week, Solana cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds. It's the third of four planned reductions and sped up block production by nearly 17%. A separate consensus upgrade is being tested to shorten the point at which a payment becomes irreversible. Separately, the network is preparing an upgrade called Alpenglow, intended to cut transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds.

• In March, the foundation launched the Solana Developer Platform for payments infrastructure.
• Modern Treasury became a payments infrastructure partner for the platform.
• Mastercard and Western Union became the platform's first users.
• Amazon Web Services added Solana to its x402 feature, which lets website owners charge AI agents in USDC.

A bet on the institutional market

Conlan and Raees joined the foundation as Solana tries to establish itself as infrastructure for payments and tokenized assets, not just a trading platform. That kind of experience used to concentrate at commercial crypto players.

Now it's moving into nonprofit blockchain foundations, which are becoming institutional market players in their own right. The coming months will show whether the foundation's new partnerships turn into real payment traffic on the network.