The Solana Foundation on Thursday named Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. The appointments strengthen the foundation’s senior leadership as it expands efforts around institutional adoption, stablecoin usage and tokenized financial products.

Conlan most recently served three years at Binance, including as global chief marketing officer, before departing in June. She previously held senior positions at OKX, CAA Sports and the advertising group Havas. In her new role she will oversee strategy covering institutional partnerships, ecosystem expansion and go-to-market initiatives designed to attract businesses to the Solana network.

Raees joins from Polygon Labs. His earlier experience includes roles at stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, now part of Stripe, and payments company Wyre. As general manager of payments he will work with payment providers, enterprises and developers to broaden Solana’s use as infrastructure for global money movement, with particular attention to stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

Leadership Aligns with Tokenization Push

The hires arrive as the foundation promotes its “Token Supercycle” view that money, assets and ownership are shifting onto always-on digital infrastructure. Solana Foundation President Lily Liu has framed the transition as the basis for Internet Capital Markets, in which assets can be issued, traded and settled natively online.

Conlan described the network’s existing activity as a key draw. “What brought me to Solana was the ambition of the builders and how much is already being put to use,” she said. She added that the opportunity now is to extend that activity to a much wider audience.

According to the foundation, Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026. Real-world assets on the network exceed $4.5 billion, while tokenized equity supply has surpassed $620 million. These figures form part of the backdrop for the expanded focus on institutional and payments use cases.

Developer Tools and Ecosystem Partnerships

The leadership changes follow the March launch of the Solana Developer Platform. Modern Treasury joined as a payments infrastructure partner on that platform. Mastercard and Western Union were named among early users. Separately, Amazon Web Services added Solana support for its x402 feature, which enables website owners to charge AI agents in USDC for content access.

These initiatives aim to lower integration barriers for teams building payment services and settlement flows. By providing dedicated infrastructure and established partners, the foundation seeks to shorten development timelines for stablecoin and tokenized-deposit applications.

Network Upgrades Target Faster Finality

Technical work continues in parallel. Solana is preparing the Alpenglow upgrade, which targets a reduction in transaction finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. The network also recently cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds, the third of four planned reductions. Faster confirmation times are viewed as supportive of payments and interactive financial applications that require rapid settlement certainty.

Earlier this year the foundation also appointed Michael Coates as chief information security officer, bringing experience from Mozilla and Twitter. The latest additions continue the pattern of recruiting executives with backgrounds spanning crypto platforms, payments infrastructure and traditional enterprise roles.

Together the new strategy and payments leadership, developer tooling, cloud integrations and performance upgrades form a coordinated effort to position Solana as infrastructure for institutional finance and global payments activity.