Overview
- On Thursday, September 24, 2026 the Solana Foundation named Rachel Conlan as chief strategy officer and Jamal Raees as general manager of payments to lead institutional and payments commercialization.
- Conlan will focus on building institutional partnerships, go‑to‑market plans and ecosystem growth while Raees will work directly with payment firms and enterprises to expand Solana as payments infrastructure.
- The Foundation reported more than $5 trillion in stablecoin volume for 2026 and over $4.5 billion in real‑world assets on the network with tokenized equity supply above $620 million, figures it uses to show institutional traction.
- Technically, Solana has cut its target slot time to 250 milliseconds—the third of four planned reductions—and is testing a separate consensus upgrade intended to shorten finality times required for payment settlement.
- Solana is converting a year of partnerships and pilots into product work through its institutional developer platform, Pay.sh with Google Cloud, and regional trials with firms such as Mastercard, Western Union, Worldpay, SBI, KSNet, Shinhan Card and MoneyGram, though broader production will depend on custody, compliance and local regulation.