Solana Foundation named Rachel Conlan chief strategy officer on September 24, 20261. The same announcement, made from New York, named Jamal Raees general manager of payments. Conlan joins from Binance2. She spent three years there as global chief marketing officer before leaving in June 2026, CoinDesk reported. Raees joins from Polygon Labs. He previously worked at stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, now part of Stripe, and at crypto payments firm Wyre, CoinDesk reported.
The second executive hire at the Solana Foundation on the record since 2026
Every move CryptoLately has verified there, by the day it became public
Moves: The Moves Ledger, CryptoLately's record of verified leadership moves, Oct. 3, 2016 to Oct. 2, 2026.
Read the chart as a table
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| July 7, 2026 | Coates became Chief Information Security Officer. Michael Coates was named Chief Information Security Officer of the Solana Foundation |
| Sept. 24, 2026 | Conlan became Chief Strategy Officer. Rachel Conlan was named Chief Strategy Officer of the Solana Foundation |
45 executive hires on the record in 2026 so far
Executive hires CryptoLately has verified, by year; 2026 through Oct. 2, 2026
- 2026: 45
- 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
Moves: The Moves Ledger, CryptoLately's record of verified leadership moves, Oct. 3, 2016 to Oct. 2, 2026.
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 11 |
| 2020 | 12 |
| 2021 | 27 |
| 2022 | 37 |
| 2023 | 20 |
| 2024 | 39 |
| 2025 | 59 |
| 2026 | 45 |
The move
Conlan described what drew her to the role in the foundation's own announcement. “What brought me to Solana was the ambition of the builders and how much it is already being put to use,” Conlan said1. She framed her mandate around adoption. “The opportunity now is to bring that to a much wider audience. That means making the value clear, building the right institutional relationships and helping businesses move from interest to implementation,” she said.
Solana Foundation President Lily Liu tied the hires to a thesis she had laid out earlier in September 2026. “The Solana ecosystem is growing in both scale and ambition. We're in the early innings of the Token Supercycle, where all assets and financial activity become native to the internet, enabling markets that are faster, more accessible and always on,” Liu said in the foundation's announcement1. She praised both hires by name. “Exceptional leaders choose Solana because they want to be close to what's being built,” Liu said, naming Conlan's experience "translating complex technology into something people actually adopt".
Solana's push into institutional finance
Solana had processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2026 through the date of the announcement, the foundation said1. Real-world assets on the network had surpassed $4.5 billion by then. Tokenized equity supply had crossed $620 million, the foundation said. CoinDesk put the stablecoin figure at more than $5 trillion using Allium data, and cited RWA.xyz data for the $4.5 billion tokenized-asset figure2. More than $600 million of that total sat in tokenized stocks, according to Blockworks data CoinDesk cited. Raees described the network's position in payments. “Solana has the performance, reliability and developer ecosystem to support payments at global scale,” he said in the foundation's statement. Michael Coates had joined earlier in 2026 as chief information security officer from Mozilla and Twitter, the foundation noted, calling the new hires part of “a growing number of senior operators choosing to join and build within the Solana ecosystem”.
What to watch
Conlan's mandate covers institutional partnerships and go-to-market work1. That kind of work takes months to show results, so the first test is which companies the foundation names as new partners after her start. Raees's payments remit points to a second marker. Watch whether payment companies and enterprises begin running transaction volume through Solana, rather than only holding tokenized assets on it2. Liu set the foundation's own standard for judging both hires. “The question is no longer whether markets move onchain, it's how fast, and onto whose infrastructure,” she said, a line that applies equally to rival chains making the same pitch.
Sources
- "Solana Foundation Appoints Rachel Conlan as Chief Strategy Officer and Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payments," Solana Foundation, September 24, 2026, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/solana-foundation-appoints-rachel-conlan-as-chief-strategy-officer-and-jamal-raees-as-general-manager-of-payments-302888568.html
- Krisztian Sandor, "Solana Foundation hires Binance, Polygon veterans as it ramps up tokenized finance push," CoinDesk, September 24, 2026, https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/24/solana-foundation-hires-binance-polygon-veterans-as-it-ramps-up-tokenized-finance-push