Solana Foundation Appoints Rachel Conlan and Jamal Raess to Drive Institutional and Payments Growth

The Solana Foundation is expanding its leadership team with the appointment of Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raess as general manager of payments. The hires arrive as Solana pushes deeper into institutional markets, tokenized assets and global payments.

New Leadership for Institutional Growth

Conlan joins the Foundation after three years as global chief marketing officer at Binance. In her new role, she will focus on institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market strategy for businesses and users.

Her mandate is tied to Solana’s broader effort to position itself as a leading venue for onchain economic activity. The Foundation said Conlan’s experience will help guide the network’s growth as demand from traditional finance and digital-asset companies continues to expand.

Raess will lead the Foundation’s payments strategy. His previous experience includes roles at Polygon Labs, Bridge and Wyre, where he worked across payment infrastructure and enterprise-focused initiatives. He will collaborate with payment companies and businesses to demonstrate Solana’s ability to support payments at global scale.

Solana Foundation President Lily Liu described the industry as being in the early stages of a “Token Supercycle,” arguing that the central question is increasingly how quickly financial markets move onchain and which infrastructure they use.

Stablecoins, Payments and Tokenized Assets

The appointments come as Solana reports strong activity across several institutional-facing sectors:

• The network has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume.
• Solana’s stablecoin supply has surpassed $15 billion, supported by native stablecoins from Western Union and SoFi.
• Solana commands more than 50% of the market share for x402 payments, according to Artemis Data.
• The network’s real-world asset market exceeds $4.5 billion.
• More than 929,000 wallets hold equities onchain, while tokenized-asset markets process over $1.1 billion in weekly volume.

The Foundation’s announcement also points to growing involvement from established financial companies, including MoneyGram and Western Union, as traditional payment and financial activity moves toward blockchain-based rails.

What This Means

The new appointments signal that the Solana Foundation is treating institutional adoption and payments as core growth priorities rather than separate ecosystem initiatives. Conlan’s focus on partnerships and market positioning complements Raess’s enterprise payments mandate, giving the Foundation dedicated leadership across both demand generation and practical financial infrastructure.

Solana’s reported stablecoin, real-world asset and tokenized-equity activity strengthens that case, although sustained adoption will depend on whether institutions can convert experimentation into durable transaction flows. Planned performance improvements, including a targeted 200-millisecond final slot time and the Alpenglow update, could further support that expansion. Together, the leadership changes and network roadmap reinforce Solana’s push to become a major settlement layer for institutional finance and global payments.