Solana Foundation Hires Binance’s Former Global CMO for Institutional Push

The Solana Foundation has hired Binance’s former global chief marketing officer as its chief strategy officer, and a Polygon Labs executive to run payments, as the non-profit builds a senior team focused on institutional adoption and payments.

Rachel Conlan spent three years as Binance’s global CMO and previously held senior roles at OKX, the sports agency CAA Sports and the advertising group Havas. Her brief covers institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and go-to-market, the Foundation said.

Jamal Raees joins as general manager of payments from Polygon Labs, having previously worked at the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and the payments company Wyre. He will work with payment companies and enterprises on expanding Solana’s use as payments infrastructure.

Solana’s “Token Supercycle”

Solana has processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume so far in 2026, according to the Foundation, with real-world assets on the network passing $4.5 billion and tokenized equity supply crossing $620 million.

The Foundation frames the shift as a “Token Supercycle,” its term for the migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure, and as the basis for what it calls Internet Capital Markets, where assets are issued, traded and settled natively online. Solana developers set out a roadmap under that banner in July 2025, aimed at reworking the network’s market structure to host the most liquid markets.

“The question is no longer whether markets move onchain,” said Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, but “how fast, and onto whose infrastructure.”

The hires land while the network itself is being rebuilt underneath. Solana cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds last week, a nearly 17% speedup in how often blocks are produced and the third of four planned reductions, with a separate consensus overhaul in testing to shorten the point at which a payment can no longer be reversed.

Conlan and Raees follow Michael Coates, who joined as chief information security officer earlier this year from Mozilla and Twitter.