Solana Foundation hires Binance's former global CMO for institutional push

The Solana Foundation hired Binance's former global chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer. The Foundation also hired Polygon Labs executive Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. Conlan spent three years as Binance's global CMO. She previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas. The Foundation said Conlan's brief covers institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market. Raees previously worked at stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and payments company Wyre. He will work with payment companies and enterprises to expand Solana's use as payments infrastructure. The Foundation said Solana processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026. Real-world assets on the network passed $4.5 billion. Tokenized equity supply crossed $620 million. The Foundation calls this shift a "Token Supercycle." It defines the term as moving money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure. The Foundation describes Internet Capital Markets as markets where assets are issued, traded and settled natively online. Solana developers published a roadmap under that banner in July 2025. The roadmap aimed to rework the network's market structure to host the most liquid markets. Solana Foundation President Lily Liu said the question is how fast markets move onchain and whose infrastructure they use. Solana cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds last week. The change produced a nearly 17% increase in the frequency of block production. It was the third of four planned reductions. A separate consensus overhaul is in testing to shorten the point at which a payment can no longer be reversed. Conlan and Raees followed Michael Coates, who joined as chief information security officer earlier this year from Mozilla and Twitter.