Solana Foundation: institutional growth and payments focus

The Solana Foundation is strengthening its institutional and payments strategy with two senior hires. Rachel Conlan was named chief strategy officer; she spent three years at Binance and previously held senior roles at OKX, CAA Sports and Havas. Jamal Raess joins as general manager of payments and will focus on driving adoption of stablecoins, tokenized deposits and payments infrastructure for teams building on Solana.

These moves accompany a flurry of partnership announcements, including Modern Treasury as a payments infrastructure partner on the Solana Developer Platform, ties with Amazon Web Services, and expanded collaborations with Mastercard and Western Union. The network has processed about $5 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2026, reports more than $4.5 billion in real-world assets and over $620 million in tokenized equity supply. Solana is preparing the Alpenglow upgrade to shorten transaction finality from roughly 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds. The hires were announced via social media and have been met with cautious market optimism; one market indicator shows a 49.2% probability of reaching $120 in September.