Solana Foundation raids Binance, Polygon Labs to staff up its stablecoin and payments playbook 🧾

The Solana Foundation has named former Binance global chief marketing officer Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and hired former Polygon Labs executive Jamal Raees as general manager of payments, the non-profit said Thursday, as it expands its senior team around institutional adoption and payments infrastructure. Conlan spent three years at Binance and previously held senior roles at OKX, the sports agency CAA Sports and the advertising group Havas. Her brief covers institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market efforts to bring businesses onto Solana. Raees joins from Polygon Labs and previously worked at the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and the payments company Wyre.

Raees said he will deepen the foundation's engagement with major payments companies and focus on infrastructure used by teams building payment services on Solana. "My focus will be on driving greater adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with an emphasis on global markets," he said in a statement provided by the Solana Foundation. The hires follow Michael Coates, who joined as chief information security officer earlier this year from Mozilla and Twitter.

The appointments come alongside a flurry of new partnerships. Solana has named the San Francisco fintech Modern Treasury as a payments infrastructure partner in the foundation's newly launched Solana Developer Platform. The foundation has also expanded existing collaborations with Mastercard and Western Union, and earlier this year inked a deal with Amazon Web Services to support stablecoin payments on the blockchain.

The foundation frames the broader push as a "Token Supercycle," its term for the migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure and 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, 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 network itself is being rebuilt underneath the new team. Solana cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds last week, a nearly 17% speedup in how often blocks are produced and the third of four planned reductions, with a separate consensus overhaul, Alpenglow, in testing to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. The foundation said Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026, with more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets on the network and more than $620 million in tokenized equity supply.