The Solana Foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. The appointments strengthen institutional growth and payments leadership as more financial activity moves onto Solana.
Solana Foundation's Chief Strategy Officer, Rachel Conlan, and GM of Payments, Jamal Raees
Financial activity moves into production
These appointments reflect the maturation of the Solana ecosystem and come at a point of step-change in onchain activity. In 2026 alone, Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume. Real-world assets on the network have surpassed $4.5 billion, while tokenized equity supply has crossed $620 million. Payments, treasuries, funds and equities are moving beyond experimentation and into production on Solana — operating globally, 24 hours a day.
That shift has a name: the Token Supercycle - the long-term migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure. It is the thesis behind Internet Capital Markets, where any asset can be issued, traded and settled natively on the internet, and where market access is defined by connectivity rather than by geography or institutional tier.
Rachel Conlan to lead strategy
Conlan’s remit is to convert that thesis into adoption. She will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market work that brings Solana’s infrastructure to the companies and users who will run on it.
She joins from Binance, where she spent three years as Global Chief Marketing Officer, and previously held senior leadership roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.
What brought me to Solana was the ambition of the builders and how much it is already being put to use. The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience. That means making the value clear, building the right institutional relationships and helping businesses move from interest to implementation.
— Rachel Conlan, Chief Strategy fficer, Solana Foundation
Jamal Raees to expand payments
Raees will build on Solana’s existing momentum in payments, working with payment companies, enterprises and the broader ecosystem to expand the adoption and reach of Solana as global payments infrastructure. He joins from Polygon Labs and previously held roles at Bridge and Wyre.
Payments are one of the clearest areas where blockchain infrastructure is moving from promise to production. Solana has the performance, reliability and developer ecosystem to support payments at global scale. Solana has moved beyond crypto into technology for finance, and I’m eager to bring Solana to enterprises and payment companies around the world.
— Jamal Raees, general manager of payments, Solana Foundation
Leadership for the next phase
Solana Foundation President Lily Liu links the appointments to the ecosystem’s growing scale and ambition:
The Solana ecosystem is growing in both scale and ambition. 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.
Exceptional leaders choose Solana because they want to be close to what’s being built. Rachel brings deep experience translating complex technology into something people actually adopt, while Jamal brings years of experience building payment infrastructure and working with enterprises on the future of money. That is the work in front of us. The question is no longer whether markets move onchain — it’s how fast, and onto whose infrastructure.
— Lily Liu, president, Solana Foundation
These appointments are the latest in a growing number of senior operators choosing to join and build within the Solana ecosystem. Earlier this year, Michael Coates joined the Solana Foundation as chief information security officer, bringing senior security expertise from Mozilla and Twitter.
For more information, visit solana.org. For media inquiries, contact press@solana.org.
