The Solana Foundation hires a strategy chief and a payments GM
Victoria Shinder1 min readThe Solana Foundation has appointed Rachel Conlan as Chief Strategy Officer and Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payments. The foundation frames both hires around institutional growth and payments as financial activity moves onto the network.
It gives figures for the year to date: more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume processed on Solana during 2026, real-world assets on the network above $4.5 billion, and tokenised equity supply past $620 million. The foundation's own description of the shift is a migration of money, assets and ownership onto always-on infrastructure, which it calls the Token Supercycle.
What it means
Creating a General Manager of Payments is the more informative of the two appointments. A general manager owns a line of business with counterparties and service levels, which is a different job from ecosystem development, and it is the title you create when the people on the other side of the conversation are payment companies rather than developers.
The figures are the foundation's own and should be read as such - stablecoin volume in particular counts transfers rather than economic activity, and a single treasury rebalancing can move it. The number that resists that reading is tokenised equity supply, because supply is a stock rather than a flow: $620 million is what is actually issued and outstanding, and it cannot be inflated by moving the same asset twice.