Solana Foundation hires ex-Binance CMO and payments exec as new partnerships expand

Solana Foundation appoints former Binance CMO and Polygon Labs exec as new leaders

Rachel Conlan has been named chief strategy officer by the Solana Foundation, following a series of new partnership announcements. Conlan, who previously worked at Binance for three years, will lead efforts to bring businesses onto the Solana platform, focusing on institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and expanding connections with major payments companies. Her responsibilities will also include driving adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

Jamal Raees has been appointed general manager of payments at the foundation. With a background at Polygon Labs, Raees will deepen Solana's engagement with payments companies and focus on infrastructure used by teams building payment services on the blockchain. He emphasized the importance of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, particularly in global markets.

The management changes coincide with a wave of new partnerships for Solana, including a collaboration with Modern Treasury that will see the fintech become a payments infrastructure partner in the Foundation's Solana Developer Platform. Other recent deals include partnerships with Amazon Web Services to support stablecoin payments on the blockchain, as well as existing collaborations with Mastercard and Western Union.

Solana is set to deploy Alpenglow, a network upgrade aimed at reducing transaction finality from around 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. The faster finality remains a primary target for the upgrade. The network has already processed over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2026, with more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets and more than $620 million in tokenized equity supply on the platform.