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Solana News: Solana Foundation Hires Binance, Polygon Veterans for Tokenized Finance Push
The hires aim to expand stablecoin payments and tokenized deposits as Solana reports more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume this year, Allium data shows.
On Thursday, the Solana Foundation appointed Rachel Conlan as Chief Strategy Officer and Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payments to accelerate institutional finance and tokenized asset growth.
Conlan spent three years at Binance as global chief marketing officer before joining Solana, while Raees comes from Polygon Labs with prior experience at stablecoin infrastructure firms Bridge and Wyre.
Solana processed more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2026, while tokenized assets reached $4.5 billion and tokenized equity supply crossed $620 million, according to Allium and Blockworks data.
The foundation collaborated with Modern Treasury as a payments infrastructure partner on its Solana Developer Platform, while preparing the Alpenglow upgrade to reduce transaction finality from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds.
Solana Foundation President Lily Liu characterizes this transition as the "Token Supercycle," a thesis centered on migrating money and assets onto always-on internet infrastructure operating continuously outside traditional market hours.
The Solana Foundation has strengthened its management staff to increase the use of the network by companies and payment organizations. Two executives from Binance and Polygon Labs backgrounds were appointed to head corporate partnerships and payments operations.