Rachel Conlan and Jamal Raees join as Solana aims to court institutions moving payments and assets onchain.
- Former Binance marketing chief Rachel Conlan joins the Solana Foundation as chief strategy officer, while Polygon Labs veteran Jamal Raees will lead payments.
- The hires come as Solana courts financial institutions building with stablecoins, payments, tokenized funds and other real-world assets.
- The appointments fit President Lily Liu's “Token Supercycle” thesis that money, assets and ownership will increasingly migrate to always-on internet infrastructure.
The Solana Foundation has appointed former Binance executive Rachel Conlan as its new chief strategy officer, adding a high-profile crypto industry veteran as the Solana (SOL) blockchain makes a bigger push into institutional finance and tokenized assets.
Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and efforts to bring more companies onto Solana, the foundation said Thursday. She spent previously three years at Binance, most recently as global chief marketing officer, before leaving the crypto exchange in June.
The foundation also hired Jamal Raees as general manager for payments. Raees joins from Polygon Labs, the development organization behind the Polygon network (POL), and previously worked at stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge (now part of Stripe) and crypto payments firm Wyre. He will focus on getting payments companies and other businesses to use Solana for moving money.
The appointments come as Solana increasingly courts traditional financial firms and positions its network as infrastructure for more than crypto trading. Stablecoin payments, tokenized funds and equities have become a bigger part of that pitch as financial institutions experiment with moving assets and settlement onto public blockchains.
Earlier this month, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu laid out what she called the “Token Supercycle,” making the case of a long-term migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on blockchain infrastructure. The idea is that more financial activity, from payments to securities, will eventually move onto networks that operate continuously rather than within traditional market hours.
The Solana chain has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far this year, Allium data shows. Meanwhile, tokenized assets on the network reached $4.5 billion, according to RWA.xyz, including more than $600 million in stocks, according to data by Blockworks.
“The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience,” Conlan said in a statement. “That means making the value clear, building the right institutional relationships and helping businesses move from interest to implementation.”
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