Solana coin moving through bright institutional payment rails

Solana Hires Binance and Polygon Veterans to Push Payments Into the Big Leagues

By Isaac • September 24, 2026 3:09 pm • Comments

Solana is no longer acting like raw speed is enough to win the next round of crypto adoption.

The Solana Foundation has hired former Binance global marketing chief Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Polygon Labs veteran Jamal Raees as general manager of payments. The pairing is a clear signal: Solana wants to turn its technical capacity and growing stablecoin footprint into business that major institutions actually use.

CoinDesk reports that Conlan will lead institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and the effort to bring more companies onto the network. She spent three years at Binance and previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas.

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Raees is taking the other half of the assignment: payments. His background includes Polygon Labs as well as stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge and crypto payments firm Wyre.

Conlan will be responsible for getting institutions to understand and adopt the network, while Raees will work with payment companies and enterprises that need the infrastructure to move money. That division of labor gives the announcement more weight than a routine executive shuffle.

CoinDesk also placed the hires inside Solana’s broader push into stablecoins, tokenized funds and equities. The foundation is betting that institutions will use public blockchains for settlement instead of limiting them to speculative trading.

The scale behind those hires is already substantial. The Block says Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume during 2026.

Real-world assets on the network have topped $4.5 billion, while tokenized equity supply has moved past $620 million. Those are no longer pilot-project numbers, but they still have to translate into repeatable business relationships.

Processing volume is not the same as owning the customer relationship. Solana now needs banks, payment companies and large businesses to choose its rails deliberately—and to keep using them after the pilot stage ends.

Foundation President Lily Liu has framed the opportunity as a “Token Supercycle,” meaning a long migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure. Conlan’s job is to make that vision understandable and useful to institutions.

Raees must make the payments side work at global scale. The foundation has effectively separated the sales-and-strategy challenge from the operational payments challenge.

Cointelegraph adds that the appointments follow the March launch of the Solana Developer Platform, which counts Modern Treasury as a payments infrastructure partner and named Mastercard and Western Union as early users. Amazon Web Services has also added Solana support to an x402 feature that lets websites charge AI agents in USDC.

The same report points to Alpenglow, a planned network upgrade intended to cut transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. Faster finality matters because a payment network cannot ask businesses to tolerate long periods of uncertainty about whether a transfer is complete.

Raees said his focus would be wider use of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, especially in global markets. That connects the foundation’s personnel move directly to the infrastructure and partnerships it has been assembling throughout the year.

Solana’s token was trading near $117 when this article was prepared, with a market capitalization of roughly $68.9 billion and a No. 7 ranking. That puts the network firmly among crypto’s largest assets, but still leaves a wide gap between its current value and the scale of the traditional payments market it is chasing.

The important part of this announcement is not that two recognizable executives changed jobs. It is that Solana is building separate leadership lanes for institutional strategy and payments execution.

The network already has activity. Now it is staffing up to convert that activity into durable adoption.

If Conlan can bring institutions from interest to implementation—and Raees can make Solana a dependable part of global payment operations—the hires could matter far more than the usual crypto executive shuffle.

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