Solana Foundation Bolsters Leadership Amid Payments Push

The Solana Foundation is revamping its leadership to drive growth in payments infrastructure and institutional business development. The foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan, former Binance CMO, as chief strategy officer, while Jamal Raees, ex-Polygon exec, has been named general manager of payments.

Conlan will oversee institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and efforts to bring more businesses onto the Solana network. Raees plans to deepen the foundation's engagement with major payments companies and focus on infrastructure used by teams building payment services on Solana.

The Solana Foundation has also launched new partnerships, including collaborations with Modern Treasury, Amazon Web Services, Mastercard, and Western Union, to broaden its stablecoin and enterprise payments infrastructure. The upcoming Alpenglow network upgrade aims to reduce transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds, supporting over $5 trillion in stablecoin volume by 2026.