Solana Foundation appoints Rachel Conlan and Jamal Raees to strategy and payments roles

The Solana Foundation appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments on September 24, adding executives from Binance and Polygon Labs to its institutional and payments work. The Block reported the appointments, citing the foundation's announcement, while CoinDesk separately detailed the two executives' responsibilities and previous roles.

Conlan will oversee strategy spanning institutional partnerships and growth of the Solana ecosystem. Raees will work with payments companies, enterprises and other participants to increase use of Solana for moving money. The appointments divide that commercial work between a broader strategy role and a dedicated payments role.

"The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience," Conlan said in the statement quoted by CoinDesk. She identified institutional relationships and helping businesses move from interest to implementation as parts of that work. The announcement does not attach a numerical adoption target or a specific new customer contract to either appointment.

The executives' previous roles

Conlan spent three years at Binance, most recently as global chief marketing officer, before leaving the exchange in June, according to CoinDesk's report. Her earlier senior positions included roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas, The Block reports. At the foundation, her remit extends across institutional partnerships and efforts to bring additional companies into the ecosystem.

Raees joins from Polygon Labs. He previously worked at stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, now part of Stripe, and crypto payments company Wyre, according to the reporting on his appointment. His new role is focused on payments adoption and the network's use as infrastructure by other businesses.

The organization making the appointments is the Solana Foundation. On its own website, it describes itself as a nonprofit based in Zug, Switzerland, with a mission covering decentralization, adoption and security of the Solana ecosystem. It operates grants and validator-delegation programs as part of that work. The two new appointments concern its strategy and payments activities, rather than an announced change to the blockchain's consensus rules.

Payments and tokenized assets in the foundation's strategy

Foundation president Lily Liu linked the appointments to her view that money, assets and ownership will move onto infrastructure operating continuously over the internet. In a September 2 essay published on Solana's website, Liu called that prospective migration the "Token Supercycle." It is the foundation president's long-term thesis, not a timetable for the conversion of financial markets.

The essay distinguishes several participants in that strategy. Issuers seek broader distribution for assets; investors seek access to ownership and financing; and applications provide interfaces through which customers reach money and markets. That framing helps explain why the foundation has assigned one executive to wider institutional relationships and another to payments adoption.

The same essay identifies existing payment-related activity on the network, including Visa's use of Solana for USDC settlement, PayPal's PYUSD payments and payouts, MoneyGram's entry and exit services, and Western Union's USDPT stablecoin. Those examples provide context for the appointments. They do not establish that either incoming executive negotiated those arrangements or that the foundation has announced new terms with those companies.

Alongside the hiring announcement, the foundation cited more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume processed this year, more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets on Solana and tokenized equity supply above $620 million, as reported by The Block. These measures describe different things: transfer volume over a period and the value or supply of assets on the network. They cannot be added together as a single adoption figure.

Liu's earlier essay also acknowledges that onchain volumes remain small relative to traditional markets and that tokenized assets are a small share of the securities they represent. The appointment coverage specifies institutional-partnership and payments responsibilities, but does not disclose the executives' compensation, budgets or a deadline for delivering additional commercial deployments.