Solana Foundation appoints Conlan strategy chief and Raees payments GM

Solana Foundation appointed former Binance chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer. It appointed former Polygon Labs executive Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships. She will also oversee ecosystem growth and efforts to bring businesses onto Solana. The foundation announced the appointments Thursday. Conlan spent three years at Binance. She previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas. Raees said he would deepen the foundation's engagement with major payments companies. He will focus on infrastructure used by teams building payment services on Solana. Raees said his focus would be greater adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits in global markets. The appointments follow new partnership announcements. Solana Foundation is collaborating with Modern Treasury. Modern Treasury will become a payments infrastructure partner in the newly launched Solana Developer Platform. Solana also reached agreements earlier this year with Amazon Web Services to support stablecoin payments on the blockchain. Solana expanded existing collaborations with Mastercard and Western Union. Solana is preparing to deploy Alpenglow. The planned network upgrade is intended to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. The faster finality remains a target for the upgrade. The network has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026. Solana also reported more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets on the network. It reported more than $620 million in tokenized equity supply.