Solana Foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. Conlan, formerly the chief marketing officer at Binance, will oversee institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and business onboarding. Her professional background includes three years at Binance, as well as senior positions at OKX, CAA Sports, and Havas.
Jamal Raees, previously an executive at Polygon Labs, will focus on deepening the foundation's engagement with payment companies. His primary objective is to increase the adoption of stablecoins and tokenized deposits in global markets. He will also support the infrastructure development for teams building payment services directly on the Solana blockchain.
These leadership changes follow a series of new partnership announcements for the foundation. Solana recently collaborated with Modern Treasury, which joined as a payments infrastructure partner for the newly launched Solana Developer Platform. Earlier this year, the foundation also secured deals with Amazon Web Services, Mastercard, and Western Union.
The network is currently preparing for the Alpenglow upgrade, which aims to reduce transaction finality from approximately 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. In 2026, the Solana network has processed over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume. Additionally, the platform reports over $4.5 billion in real-world assets and more than $620 million in tokenized equity supply.
