Solana Foundation taps Binance, Polygon vets to drive institutional adoption and payments

The Solana Foundation said Thursday it has appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments, filling two senior roles aimed at expanding institutional adoption and payments activity on the network.

Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships and ecosystem growth. She joins after three years at Binance and has previously held senior leadership positions at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas. Raees will work with payment companies, enterprises and the wider ecosystem to broaden Solana's use as global payments infrastructure; he arrives from Polygon Labs.

"The Solana ecosystem is growing in both scale and ambition," said Solana Foundation President Lily Liu. "We're in the early innings of the Token Supercycle, where all assets and financial activity become native to the internet, enabling markets that are faster, more accessible and always on."

The foundation uses the term "Token Supercycle" to describe the long-term shift of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure. "The question is no longer whether markets move onchain," Liu said, "it's how fast, and onto whose infrastructure."

Network activity cited

According to the Solana Foundation, the network has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume this year. Real-world assets on Solana have passed $4.5 billion, while tokenized equity supply has crossed $620 million.

Conlan said the draw was the ambition of builders on the network and how much is already in use. "The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience," she said, adding that this means making the value clear, building the right institutional relationships and helping businesses move from interest to implementation.

The appointments follow other foundation initiatives this year. It partnered with SBI Holdings to build a Japan-based onchain financial market, and rolled out a pay-as-you-go system for AI agents with Google Cloud.