The Solana Foundation, the non-profit behind the Solana blockchain, has hired Rachel Conlan, Binance's former global chief marketing officer, as its chief strategy officer, and appointed Jamal Raees, a Polygon Labs executive, as general manager of payments, as it builds out a senior team focused on institutional adoption and payments.

Conlan spent three years as global CMO of Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, and previously held senior roles at the crypto exchange OKX, the sports agency CAA Sports and the advertising group Havas. Her brief covers institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market, the Foundation said.

Raees joins from Polygon Labs, the developer of the Ethereum scaling network Polygon, and previously worked at the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, acquired by Stripe in 2025, and the payments company Wyre. He will work with payment companies and enterprises on expanding Solana's use as payments infrastructure.

Solana's "Token Supercycle"

The appointments come as the Foundation highlights the scale of activity on the network. Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume (tokens pegged to assets such as the US dollar) so far in 2026, with real assets on the network passing $4.5 billion and tokenized equity supply crossing $620 million.

The Foundation frames the shift as a "Token Supercycle" — its term for the migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure — and as the basis for what it calls Internet Capital Markets, where assets are issued, traded and settled natively online. Solana developers set out a roadmap under that banner in July 2025, in a Token Supercycle op-ed aimed at reworking the network's market structure to host the most liquid markets.

"The question is no longer whether markets move onchain," said Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, but "how fast, and onto whose infrastructure."

The hires land as the network itself is being rebuilt underneath. Last week, Solana cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds, a speedup of nearly 17% in how often blocks are produced and the third of four planned reductions. A separate consensus overhaul is in testing, intended to shorten the point at which a payment can no longer be reversed — a property known as finality.

Conlan and Raees follow Michael Coates, who joined the Foundation as chief information security officer earlier this year from Mozilla and Twitter — a leadership bench that now spans exchange marketing, stablecoin and payments infrastructure, and security.