Ex-Binance, Ex-Polygon Walk Into Solana: Foundation's New C-Suite Has Range 🏦

The Solana Foundation named Rachel Conlan, formerly Chief Marketing Officer at Binance, as its new Chief Strategy Officer and Polygon Labs veteran Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payments, the foundation announced on September 24, 2026. Conlan, who served three years as global CMO at Binance and previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas, will lead institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and sales initiatives aimed at drawing companies to the Solana network. Raees, whose background includes payment-systems and stablecoins work at Bridge (now part of Stripe) and Wyre, will build relationships with payment companies as the foundation courts banks, asset managers and financial firms increasingly moving activity onchain.

Conlan framed the move publicly on X the same day, writing, "I've joined @SolanaFndn as Chief Strategy Officer. What excites me is Solana's position to bring Internet Capital Markets to life: connecting assets, trading and payments on one global network, open to anyone, around the clock." She cited $200M in related activity in the post. The hires come as Solana leads all blockchains in tokenized stock trading, listing more tokenized equities than any competing platform, while processing $5 trillion in stablecoin volume at transaction fees of just 0.000005 SOL per transaction.

Markets responded to the broader backdrop, with SOL trading around $123–$124.25, up roughly 2.8% on the day and +14.79% to +15% on the week as of September 27, 2026. The foundation has positioned the appointments as part of a push to convert blockchain-native momentum into conventional financial-sector partnerships.

The personnel additions land as Solana continues to pitch itself as infrastructure for tokenized assets and payments, betting that executives with Binance, OKX, Polygon Labs, Stripe-owned Bridge and Wyre pedigrees can shorten the path from crypto-native users to traditional finance counterparties across retail and institutional channels.