The Solana Foundation named Rachel Conlan, Binance’s former global chief marketing officer, as its new Chief Strategy Officer Jamal Raees, previously of Polygon Labs, joins as General Manager
The Solana Foundation announced two senior hires aimed at deepening the network’s push into institutional finance and payments, according to a press release. Rachel Conlan joins as Chief Strategy Officer after three years as Binance’s global chief marketing officer, with earlier senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports, and Havas. In her new role she will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and go-to-market efforts for the Foundation.
Jamal Raees joins as General Manager of Payments, moving from Polygon Labs, where he worked on that network’s own payments efforts, following earlier roles at Bridge and Wyre. Raees will lead Solana’s payments expansion, working directly with payment companies and enterprises to grow the network’s use as infrastructure for global payments rather than solely as a venue for crypto trading.
“The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience by making value clear and helping businesses move from interest to implementation,” Conlan said of her new role. Raees said Solana “has the performance and reliability to support payments at global scale, moving beyond crypto into technology for finance,” framing the network’s pitch to payment companies around throughput and settlement speed rather than crypto-specific use cases.
The Foundation cited Solana’s 2026 volume figures as context for the hires: the network processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume over the year, and the value of tokenized real-world assets issued on Solana has grown past $4.5 billion. Both figures have been central to the Foundation’s pitch to traditional payment and financial firms evaluating blockchain infrastructure.
The appointments follow a broader pattern across major layer-1 networks of hiring executives with backgrounds at centralized exchanges and other blockchain platforms to lead institutional and payments efforts, as competition intensifies among networks seeking to become the settlement layer of choice for banks, payment processors, and asset managers moving activity onchain.
Both hires report into the Foundation’s existing leadership and add headcount specifically dedicated to institutional and payments relationships, areas that had previously been handled alongside broader ecosystem-growth responsibilities rather than as standalone functions. The Foundation framed the new roles as a direct response to inbound interest from payment companies and financial institutions evaluating Solana, rather than as a shift in the network’s existing technical roadmap.
This post first appeared in Solana Foundation Hires Binance’s Former CMO and a Polygon Payments Veteran for Its Institutional Push
