Solana Foundation appoints former Binance CMO and payments executive amid expanding partnerships

Solana Foundation announced two senior hires as it accelerates a series of new partnership initiatives. Former Binance chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan joins as chief strategy officer, and former Polygon Labs executive Jamal Raees becomes general manager of payments.

Leadership roles and focus areas

Conlan will lead strategy for institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and business onboarding to Solana. Her background includes three years at Binance and senior positions at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.

Raees will deepen the foundation’s work with major payments firms and drive adoption of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with an emphasis on global markets.

Recent partnership activity

The hires follow several high‑profile collaborations:

• Modern Treasury joins as a payments infrastructure partner for the newly launched Solana Developer Platform.
• Amazon Web Services partners to support stablecoin payments on Solana.
• Existing relationships with Mastercard and Western Union are being expanded.

Network upgrades and on‑chain activity

Solana is preparing the Alpenglow upgrade, targeting a reduction in transaction finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds.

In 2026 the network has processed over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume, reported more than $4.5 billion in real‑world assets, and hosts over $620 million in tokenized equity supply.