Solana Foundation Names Rachel Conlan Chief Strategy Officer, Jamal Raees Payments GM

The Solana Foundation has appointed former Binance chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and former Polygon Labs executive Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. The leadership changes arrive as Solana pursues broader adoption among financial institutions, payments companies and businesses building onchain services.

New Leadership Focuses on Institutional Growth

Conlan will oversee institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and efforts to bring more businesses onto Solana. Before joining the foundation, she spent three years at Binance and held senior positions at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.

Her appointment places an executive with experience in crypto exchanges, marketing and commercial partnerships at the center of Solana’s institutional expansion. The foundation has recently increased its focus on connecting the network with established financial and technology companies.

Raees will lead the foundation’s payments efforts, including engagement with major payments companies and infrastructure for teams developing payment services on Solana. He said his priorities include increasing adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, particularly across global markets.

Partnerships Build a Payments Ecosystem

The appointments follow several new or expanded partnerships involving Solana’s payments and financial infrastructure ambitions:

• Modern Treasury is becoming a payments infrastructure partner for the Solana Developer Platform.
• Amazon Web Services is supporting stablecoin payments on the blockchain through a deal announced earlier this year.
• Mastercard and Western Union have expanded existing collaborations with Solana.

The foundation’s strategy is increasingly centered on practical payment rails rather than solely on consumer-facing applications. Stablecoins and tokenized deposits could give companies a way to move value across borders and integrate blockchain settlement into existing financial workflows.

Solana has also reported more than $5 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume processed on the network during 2026. In addition, the network has more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets and more than $620 million in tokenized equity supply, according to the foundation.

Alpenglow Targets Faster Settlement

Solana is preparing to deploy Alpenglow, a planned network upgrade intended to reduce transaction finality from approximately 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. The faster finality figure remains a target for the upgrade, rather than a completed network capability.

If achieved, the improvement could strengthen Solana’s appeal for payment providers and institutional applications that require rapid confirmation and predictable settlement. It may also complement the foundation’s efforts to attract businesses through the Solana Developer Platform.

What This Means

The appointments signal that Solana is treating payments, stablecoins and tokenized financial assets as core growth areas. Conlan’s institutional remit and Raees’ payments mandate give the foundation dedicated leadership as partnerships multiply. The combination of reported transaction scale, financial-asset activity and the planned Alpenglow upgrade could improve Solana’s positioning in institutional blockchain infrastructure, although adoption will depend on whether these partnerships translate into sustained production usage.