Solana Foundation hires Binance, Polygon veterans for institutional push

The Solana Foundation has appointed former Binance executive Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Polygon Labs veteran Jamal Raees as general manager of payments as the network builds out its institutional and payment business after processing more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume this year. Solana Foundation appointed Rachel Conlan as strategy chief and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. Conlan will oversee institutional partnerships and ecosystem growth, while Raees will focus on payment companies and enterprises. Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume this year, while real world assets have surpassed $4.5 billion. According to the Solana Foundation, Conlan will lead strategy covering institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and efforts to bring more companies and users onto Solana, while Raees will work with payment firms and enterprises seeking to use the network as payment infrastructure. Conlan spent three years at Binance, where she served as global chief marketing officer, after earlier senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas. Raees joins from Polygon Labs and previously worked at stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge and payments company Wyre. The appointments put separate executives in charge of two areas where the foundation has spent much of 2026 building partnerships: institutional finance and payments. "The Solana ecosystem is growing in both scale and ambition," Solana Foundation President Lily Liu said. Liu described the current period as the early stages of a "Token Supercycle," a term the foundation uses for the long term migration of money, assets and ownership onto internet based infrastructure. Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume during 2026, according to figures provided by the foundation. Real world assets on the network have passed $4.5 billion, while tokenized equity supply has crossed $620 million. Solana Foundation puts institutional adoption under Conlan Conlan's role will cover the foundation's institutional strategy as more financial companies test or deploy products on Solana. "What brought me to Solana was the ambition of the builders and how much it is already being put to use," Conlan said. She said her work would include building institutional relationships and helping businesses move "from interest to implementation." Her appointment comes after several institutional projects brought tokenized securities, funds and other financial assets onto the network. Solana attracted roughly $348 million in net distributed real world asset flows over a 30 day period measured in early September, while the value of distributed RWAs on the network reached approximately $4.23 billion, crypto.news previously reported. The network hosted products from firms including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, VanEck, Circle, Ondo Finance and WisdomTree. Tokenized equities have become another part of that activity. Ondo Finance brought hundreds of tokenized U.S. stocks and exchange traded funds to Solana earlier this year, while other asset managers have used the network for tokenized Treasury and investment products. Institutional adoption has expanded outside the U.S. as well. SBI Global Asset Management and DigiFT launched a tokenized Japanese equity fund on Solana in July. The SBI Japan High Dividend Equity Strategy Token gives eligible institutional and accredited investors blockchain based access to a Japanese high dividend equity strategy. Payments become a dedicated Solana leadership role Raees will focus on payment companies, enterprises and ecosystem participants building payment services around Solana. "Payments are one of the clearest areas where blockchain infrastructure is moving from promise to production," Raees said. He pointed to Solana's performance, reliability and developer ecosystem as areas that could support payment services at global scale. The foundation has spent much of 2026 building infrastructure and partnerships around stablecoin settlement and payments. In March, it launched a developer platform designed for financial institutions and enterprises working with stablecoins, tokenized assets and payment flows. Mastercard, Western Union and Worldpay joined as early users, with the platform covering use cases including stablecoin settlement, merchant payments and cross border transfers. Issuance and payments modules were available at launch, while a trading module covering atomic swaps, vaults and onchain foreign exchange was planned for later in 2026. The foundation brought together more than 20 infrastructure providers across wallets, compliance, node infrastructure and payment ramps for the platform. MoneyGram later became a Solana validator and joined the same institutional developer platform as part of its blockchain payments strategy. The payments company was already developing stablecoin based transfer services and operating validator infrastructure across several blockchain networks. Payment trials have reached Asian markets as well. South Korean payment processor KSNet and the Solana Foundation began testing Solana Pay for merchant payments, with the companies planning to examine commercialization models after technical validation. Shinhan Card separately worked with the foundation on a stablecoin payment proof of concept using Solana's testnet. Solana expands institutional work in Japan Japan has become another part of the foundation's institutional strategy following a partnership with SBI Holdings announced in July. Under the agreement, the Solana Foundation joined SBI R3 Japan alongside SBI Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, with plans for the company to operate under the SBI Solana Global name following the required corporate process. The SBI Solana partnership covers stablecoins, tokenized assets, cross border payments and institutional onchain services. Payment systems for AI agents were listed among the planned business areas, although the partners did not provide launch dates for individual products when the venture was announced. SBI's work with Solana soon expanded into tokenized securities. Its asset management arm launched the JX token with DigiFT, while SBI later partnered with Ondo Finance to bring tokenized Japanese stocks into its financial ecosystem and use its yen backed JPYSC stablecoin for settlement and collateral. The foundation has pursued another payment model at the intersection of stablecoins and artificial intelligence. In May, Solana Foundation and Google Cloud rolled out Pay.sh, a payment gateway that lets AI agents use stablecoins to pay for individual API requests. The system allows agents to access services including Gemini, BigQuery and Vertex AI through a Solana wallet without relying on a conventional subscription for each service. Pay.sh was designed to support payments as small as fractions of a cent and uses an API proxy on Google Cloud, with the Solana wallet functioning as both a payment and identity layer. More than 50 community API providers were supported when the service was introduced. Conlan and Raees join a foundation leadership team that has added other senior executives during 2026. Michael Coates became chief information security officer earlier this year after holding senior security roles at Mozilla and Twitter, according to the foundation.