Solana Foundation Names Rachel Conlan Chief Strategy Officer and Jamal Raees to Lead Payments
The Solana Foundation has appointed former Binance CMO Rachel Conlan as Chief Strategy Officer and Jamal Raees, previously at Polygon Labs, as General Manager of Payments. Both roles target institutions and payment providers.
What Happened
The Solana Foundation filled two leadership positions on September 24: Rachel Conlan becomes Chief Strategy Officer, and Jamal Raees becomes General Manager of Payments. That is according to the Foundation’s press release, which it also shared on X.
The Two Roles
- Rachel Conlan leads strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and go-to-market, bringing Solana’s infrastructure to companies and users, per the Foundation. According to the release, she previously spent three years as Global Chief Marketing Officer at Binance; earlier roles include OKX, CAA Sports, and Havas.
- Jamal Raees is to work with payment companies, enterprises, and the ecosystem to expand the use of Solana as global payments infrastructure, per the Foundation. He joins from Polygon Labs and previously worked at Bridge and Wyre.
The Foundation’s Figures
The Foundation accompanied the appointments with its own figures for 2026. These are self-reported and not independently verified:
- $5 trillion in stablecoin volume on Solana
- real-world assets (RWA) on the network of more than $4.5 billion
- tokenized equity supply of more than $620 million
Foundation President Lily Liu frames the appointments in the release: the question is no longer whether markets move onchain, but how fast and onto whose infrastructure.
The Context
Payments and institutional access have come up repeatedly at the Foundation recently, for example with the Open Transaction Layer, the Agentic Payments Alliance, and Mastercard’s stablecoin settlement, which includes Solana. For an overview of the network’s stablecoins, see Stablecoins on Solana compared.
Note: This is reporting, not investment advice.
What to Watch
- Which institutional and payments partnerships the Foundation announces next
- How the Foundation’s stablecoin and RWA figures develop over the rest of the year
Sources
- Solana Foundation — Press release (PR Newswire) · Post on X
- SOLANA·HUB knowledge: Stablecoins on Solana compared
- SOLANA·HUB news: Mastercard stablecoin settlement · Open Transaction Layer