Solana Foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments, the Zug, Switzerland-based non-profit announced on September 24, pairing a former Binance marketing chief with a Polygon Labs payments veteran as more financial activity moves onto the network.
The appointments land at a point of accelerating onchain activity. Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026, while real-world assets on the network have surpassed $4.5 billion and tokenized equity supply has crossed $620 million, according to the foundation. Payments, treasuries, funds and equities are shifting from experimentation into production, it said. The figures frame a strategy the foundation calls Internet Capital Markets, where any asset can be issued, traded and settled natively on the internet.
What the two new leaders will run
Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and the go-to-market work that brings Solana’s infrastructure to businesses and users, a remit the foundation framed as turning its adoption thesis into implementation. She joins after three years as global chief marketing officer at Binance, with earlier senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas. Raees will focus on payment companies and enterprises, working to extend Solana’s reach as global payments infrastructure. He joins from Polygon Labs and previously held roles at Bridge and Wyre.
The Token Supercycle thesis
President Lily Liu framed both appointments around the “Token Supercycle,” the migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure. “The question is no longer whether markets move onchain — it’s how fast, and onto whose infrastructure,” Liu said, adding that exceptional leaders choose Solana because they want to be close to what is being built. Conlan said the opportunity is “to bring that to a much wider audience,” while Raees called payments “one of the clearest areas where blockchain infrastructure is moving from promise to production.”
Building on institutional momentum
The appointments follow a year of infrastructure and partnership work. Earlier this year Michael Coates joined the foundation as chief information security officer, bringing senior security expertise from Mozilla and Twitter. The hires also come as Solana moves its Alpenglow upgrade to public testnet and as stablecoin settlement spreads across banking and card rails. The foundation described the appointments as the latest in a growing number of senior operators choosing to build within the Solana ecosystem.
