- Rachel Conlan joins the Solana Foundation as chief strategy officer after three years as Binance‘s global CMO
- Jamal Raees becomes general manager of payments, arriving from Polygon Labs
- Solana cut block times to 250 milliseconds last week — the third of four planned reductions
- The network has processed over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026
The Solana Foundation has hired Binance‘s former global chief marketing officer as its chief strategy officer, alongside a Polygon Labs executive to run payments. The appointments strengthen the non-profit’s senior team focused on institutional adoption and payments infrastructure.
Rachel Conlan spent three years as Binance‘s global CMO and previously held senior roles at OKX, sports agency CAA Sports and advertising group Havas. Her brief covers institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market strategy.
Jamal Raees joins as general manager of payments from Polygon Labs, having previously worked at stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and payments company Wyre. He will collaborate with payment companies and enterprises on expanding Solana‘s use as payments infrastructure.
The Foundation reports that Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026. Real-world assets on the network have passed $4.5 billion, with tokenized equity supply crossing $620 million.
The Foundation frames this shift as a “Token Supercycle” — the migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure. This serves as the foundation for what it calls Internet Capital Markets, where assets are issued, traded and settled natively online.
“The question is no longer whether markets move onchain, but how fast, and onto whose infrastructure,” said Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation.
The hires land as Solana cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds last week — a nearly 17% speedup in block production. This marks the third of four planned reductions, with a separate consensus overhaul in testing to shorten payment finality.
Conlan and Raees follow Michael Coates, who joined as chief information security officer earlier this year from Mozilla and Twitter.
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