Solana Expands Institutional and Payments Leadership With Two Hires

Solana Foundation named Rachel Conlan as Chief Strategy Officer and Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payments on Sept. 24, according to a press release from the foundation. The two hires give the network dedicated executive leadership over institutional partnerships and payments infrastructure at a point the foundation describes as a step-change in onchain activity.

Solana Foundation Names Conlan Strategy Chief and Raees Payments Head

Conlan’s remit covers institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and the go-to-market work needed to bring Solana’s infrastructure to companies and users, per the announcement. She joins from Binance, where she spent three years as Global Chief Marketing Officer, and previously held senior leadership roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.

Raees will work with payment companies, enterprises and the broader ecosystem to expand the adoption and reach of Solana as global payments infrastructure. He joins from Polygon Labs and previously held roles at Bridge and Wyre.

The foundation frames both appointments as a reflection of the ecosystem’s maturation, arriving as more financial activity moves onto Solana in production form rather than as pilots. Neither role comes with a stated start-date milestone or first deliverable in the announcement; both are described in terms of ongoing strategic ownership rather than a fixed near-term product launch.

Foundation Frames Hires Around Onchain Financial Growth

Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, tied the hires directly to the network’s institutional trajectory. “The Solana ecosystem is growing in both scale and ambition. We’re in the early innings of the Token Supercycle, where all assets and financial activity become native to the internet, enabling markets that are faster, more accessible and always on,” Liu said.

Liu added that Conlan brings experience translating complex technology into adoption, while Raees brings years of payment-infrastructure work with enterprises. She described the current environment as one where the question is no longer whether markets move onchain, but how fast and onto whose infrastructure.

Solana Points to Stablecoins, Real-World Assets and Tokenized Equities

The foundation backed up its framing with figures from this year: Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2026, real-world assets on the network have surpassed $4.5 billion, and tokenized equity supply has crossed $620 million. Those numbers, per the announcement, reflect payments, treasuries, funds and equities moving beyond experimentation and into production use on Solana, operating globally and around the clock.

The foundation calls that migration the “Token Supercycle” – its term for the long-term shift of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure. It ties that thesis to what it calls Internet Capital Markets, a model in which any asset can be issued, traded and settled natively on the internet, with market access defined by connectivity rather than geography or institutional tier. The network’s performance characteristics are part of the pitch the foundation is making to the payment companies and enterprises Raees will now be courting directly.

The Appointees Set Out Their Operating Priorities

Conlan described her mandate in terms of translating existing builder momentum into wider commercial adoption. “The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience. That means making the value clear, building the right institutional relationships and helping businesses move from interest to implementation,” Conlan said.

Raees framed payments as the clearest proving ground for blockchain infrastructure moving from promise to production, pointing to Solana’s performance, reliability and developer ecosystem as the foundation for supporting payments at global scale. He said Solana has moved beyond crypto into technology for finance, and that he is eager to bring the network to enterprises and payment companies internationally.

Senior Hiring Continues Across the Solana Ecosystem

The foundation described Conlan and Raees’s appointments as the latest in a growing number of senior operators choosing to join and build within the Solana ecosystem. Earlier this year, Michael Coates joined the Solana Foundation as Chief Information Security Officer, bringing senior security expertise from Mozilla and Twitter.

The announcement does not specify a further executive hire pipeline or a timeline for new appointments beyond noting the trend. For now, the foundation’s public positioning rests on the stablecoin, real-world asset and tokenized equity figures it disclosed alongside the two new roles, with Conlan and Raees positioned as the operators responsible for converting that activity into deeper institutional and payments relationships.

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