Former Binance Marketing Chief and Payments Specialist Join Solana Foundation in Strategic Roles
In a strategic expansion move, the Solana Foundation welcomes Rachel Conlan to lead institutional partnerships and ecosystem development, alongside Jamal Raees who will spearhead stablecoin and tokenized deposit initiatives, amid numerous new collaborative ventures.
The Solana Foundation has brought on board Rachel Conlan, who previously served as chief marketing officer at Binance, to take up the position of chief strategy officer, while also welcoming Jamal Raees, a former executive at Polygon Labs, as general manager of payments, with both appointments arriving amid a surge of newly announced collaborative agreements.
In her new role, Conlan will be responsible for steering strategy throughout institutional partnerships, ecosystem expansion initiatives and programs designed to onboard businesses to the Solana network, according to Thursday's announcement from the foundation. Her tenure at Binance lasted three years, and her professional background includes senior positions at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.
In his new capacity, Raees indicated he would work to strengthen the foundation's relationships with leading payments companies while concentrating on the infrastructure utilized by development teams creating payment solutions on the Solana blockchain.
My focus will be on driving greater adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with an emphasis on global markets.
Jamal Raees, in a statement provided by Solana Foundation
These leadership appointments arrive as the Solana network experiences a wave of new collaborative partnerships, including a strategic alliance with Modern Treasury that will position the San Francisco-headquartered fintech firm as a payments infrastructure partner within the Foundation's recently unveiled Solana Developer Platform.
Earlier in the year, Solana also established agreements with Amazon Web Services to facilitate stablecoin payment support on the blockchain network and broadened its existing collaborative relationships with both Mastercard and Western Union.
The Solana network is currently preparing for the deployment of Alpenglow, an anticipated network enhancement designed to decrease transaction finality time from approximately 12.8 seconds down to around 150 milliseconds. Achieving this accelerated finality continues to be an objective for the planned upgrade.
Throughout 2026 to date, the network has facilitated the processing of more than $5 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume. Additionally, the platform has recorded over $4.5 billion in real-world assets present on the network alongside more than $620 million in tokenized equity supply.