Solana Foundation Brings in Binance and Polygon Veterans
With former Binance and Polygon executives, Solana wants to attract more institutional adoption and payment activity. The foundation points to billions in stablecoin volume and growth in tokenized assets.
Key Takeaways
- The Solana Foundation appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments.
- With these hires, the foundation wants to attract more institutional adoption and more payment activity on Solana.
- Solana says it has seen more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume this year, along with a growing market for real-world assets and tokenized equity.
The Solana Foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. With those hires, the organization wants to attract more institutional adoption and more payment activity on the network. At the same time, the foundation points to strong activity around Solana, with more than $5 trillion (€4.4 trillion) in stablecoin volume this year.
New Leadership for Growth
Conlan will lead strategy for institutional partnerships and ecosystem growth. She spent the past three years at Binance and previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports, and Havas. Raees will work with payment companies, businesses, and players across the broader ecosystem to further position Solana as infrastructure for global payments. He joins from Polygon Labs.
Solana Foundation president Lily Liu said the ecosystem is growing in scale and ambition. According to her, markets are still in the early phase of what the foundation calls the Token Supercycle, a shift in which money, assets, and ownership increasingly run natively on internet infrastructure.
More Usage on the Network
The timing of the appointments fits with the broader push toward real-world use cases. The foundation says the value of real-world assets on Solana has climbed above $4.5 billion (€3.9 billion), and the tokenized equity supply has now topped $620 million (€543 million). That figure rose further in September, because according to a recent market update, tokenized equity supply reached $684 million (€599 million) by mid-September.
Broader use of Solana as a settlement layer is also growing. In February, the network processed $650 billion (€570 billion) in stablecoin transactions, passing Ethereum for the first time. In addition, the Solana Foundation earlier this year announced a partnership with SBI Holdings for a Japanese onchain financial market, and it launched a pay-as-you-go system for AI agents with Google Cloud. That institutional focus lines up with the broader shift toward tokenized markets, such as the rapid growth of tokenized equities on Solana.
Why This Matters
For European crypto readers, this shows that Solana is positioning itself not just as a fast chain, but also as a network for payments and tokenized assets. The mix of new executives, growth in stablecoins, and more tokenized equity could matter for players looking at institutional products and onchain settlement. It also shows that competition between networks for financial use cases is heating up further.
