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

Solana Foundation has appointed former Binance chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and former Polygon Labs executive Jamal Raees as general manager of payments.

Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and efforts to bring businesses onto Solana, the foundation said Thursday. She spent three years at Binance and previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.

Raees said he would deepen the foundation’s engagement with major payments companies and focus on infrastructure used by teams building payment services on Solana.

“My focus will be on driving greater adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with an emphasis on global markets,” he said in a statement provided by Solana Foundation.

The appointments follow the March launch of the Solana Developer Platform, which includes Modern Treasury as a payments infrastructure partner. Mastercard and Western Union were named as early users of the platform.

Separately, Amazon Web Services included Solana among the networks supported by its x402 feature, which lets website owners charge AI agents in USDC for access to content.

Solana is preparing to deploy Alpenglow, a planned network upgrade intended to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds.

The network has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026. It also reported more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets on the network and more than $620 million in tokenized equity supply.

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