Solana Foundation Hires Binance's Former Global CMO for Institutional Push

The Solana Foundation has strengthened its senior team with two external hires aimed at accelerating institutional engagement and payments adoption. Rachel Conlan, who most recently served three years as Binance’s global chief marketing officer and earlier held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas, was named chief strategy officer. Her remit will include institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market strategy, the Foundation said.

Jamal Raees was recruited from Polygon Labs to become general manager of payments. Raees has prior experience at the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and payments provider Wyre, and will focus on collaborating with payment companies and enterprises to expand Solana’s role as payments infrastructure.

The appointments come as the Foundation highlights rapid growth metrics and advances to the underlying network. It reported that Solana has processed over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026, that real-world assets on the chain have surpassed $4.5 billion, and that tokenized equity supply has passed $620 million. The Foundation frames these trends under a "Token Supercycle" concept that envisions money, assets and ownership migrating onto always-on blockchain infrastructure.

Those strategic hires coincide with ongoing protocol work to improve performance. Last week Solana reduced its target slot time to 250 milliseconds — a roughly 17% increase in block production frequency and the third of four planned slot-time reductions — while a consensus overhaul intended to shorten the period during which a payment can be reversed is in testing. Earlier this year the Foundation also added Michael Coates as chief information security officer, who joined from Mozilla and Twitter, underscoring a broader push to scale the team around institutional and payments use cases.