Solana Foundation appointed Rachel Conlan, former chief marketing officer at Binance, as chief strategy officer on September 24. The foundation simultaneously named Jamal Raees, a former Polygon Labs executive, as general manager of payments.
Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and efforts to bring businesses onto Solana. She previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports, and Havas before spending three years at Binance.
Raees will deepen the foundation’s engagement with major payments companies and focus on infrastructure for 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,” Raees said in a statement.
Partnership Expansion
The appointments coincide with a series of partnership announcements. Modern Treasury became a payments infrastructure partner in Solana’s newly launched Developer Platform. Solana inked deals with Amazon Web Services to support stablecoin payments on the blockchain.
Solana expanded existing collaborations with Mastercard and Western Union, both major payments companies.
Network Metrics and Upgrades
Solana processed $5 trillion in stablecoin volume during 2026. The network currently hosts $4.5 billion in real-world assets and $620 million in tokenized equity supply.
The foundation is preparing to deploy Alpenglow, a network upgrade intended to reduce transaction finality. Current transaction finality stands at 12.8 seconds. After the Alpenglow upgrade, the target finality is 150 milliseconds.
