Solana Foundation hires for payments after $5trn in stablecoin volume

Solana processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2026. On Thursday the Solana Foundation named the two people who will turn that number into contracts: Rachel Conlan, chief marketing officer at Binance for three years, becomes chief strategy officer, and Jamal Raees, a former Polygon Labs executive, becomes general manager of payments.

Two hires, two different jobs

Conlan will lead strategy across institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth and the work of bringing businesses onto Solana, the foundation said. She held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas before Binance. Raees said he would deepen the foundation's work with large payments companies and focus on the infrastructure that teams building payment services on Solana depend on.

What the Solana Foundation is selling

The numbers the foundation put behind the two appointments:

• Stablecoin volume in 2026: more than $5 trillion
• Real-world assets on the network: more than $4.5 billion
• Tokenized equity supply: more than $620 million

Stablecoin volume counts each transfer, so a dollar that moves twenty times shows up as twenty dollars. The $4.5 billion in real-world assets is money parked on Solana rather than passing through it, and it sits three orders of magnitude below the volume figure. Both numbers matter to a payments buyer, and they answer different questions.

“My focus will be on driving greater adoption and usage of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with an emphasis on global markets”

— Jamal Raees, general manager of payments, Solana Foundation, statement provided by Solana Foundation, via Cointelegraph

Quote source: Cointelegraph, 24 September 2026.

Tokenized deposits sit in the part of Raees's brief that most readers have never had to think about. A stablecoin comes from a private company that holds reserves against it. A tokenized deposit is an ordinary bank deposit that the bank itself issues as a token, so the claim stays on the bank's balance sheet and inside existing banking rules. Banks prefer the second form. A payments hire who names both in his first statement is aiming at bank money, not only at the crypto-native kind.

The pipeline was already there

The appointments follow the March launch of the Solana Developer Platform, which includes Modern Treasury as a payments infrastructure partner. Mastercard and Western Union were named as early users. Amazon Web Services added Solana to its x402 feature, which lets site owners charge AI agents in USDC for access to content. We wrote a month ago about MoneyGram opening 500,000 cash locations to Solana developers.

Solana is also preparing Alpenglow, an upgrade meant to cut transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. Payments companies watch that number closely, because nobody waits 12 seconds at a checkout counter.

The upshot

Solana has the throughput and the volume. The foundation wants contracts with banks and processors, and it hired two people who have signed that kind of deal before. Conlan's background sits in brand and distribution rather than payments plumbing, so pairing her with Raees looks deliberate.

Watch which payment companies announce Solana integrations over the next two quarters. The volume counter will keep climbing either way.

Nothing here should be read as personalised investment advice.