Solana Information: The Solana Basis has appointed Michael Coates, Twitter’s first-ever Chief Info Safety Officer and a veteran of Mozilla and enterprise SaaS safety, as its new CISO, a rent that indicators the Basis is treating safety as a boardroom precedence reasonably than an engineering footnote.
Coates introduced the transfer on X on July 7, 2026, describing it as a brand new chapter pushed by his longstanding draw to fast-moving new frontiers.
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Solana Information: Why Coates Selected Solana
The draw, based on Coates, was scale. He cited Solana’s tens of billions of {dollars} in every day stablecoin quantity and its place processing extra transactions every day than a lot of the cryptocurrency business mixed because the deciding components.
He additionally pointed to the launch of SpaceX tokenized shares on Solana on the identical day the asset debuted on Nasdaq, an information level that illustrates how shortly real-world monetary exercise is migrating to the community.
Huge Replace for me – a brand new chapter and I am now CISO of @SolanaFndn .
I’ve at all times been drawn to fast-paced new frontiers. Head of Safety of Mozilla in the course of the peak of the browser wars, the primary CISO of Twitter as they burst onto the world’s stage, and whilst a startup… pic.twitter.com/nrxtpxIKqZ
— Michael Coates (@_mwc) July 7, 2026
That exercise has been constructing steadily. In response to 99Bitcoins, Solana’s decentralized utility income has reportedly grown for 9 consecutive quarters, giving institutional contributors and builders an more and more compelling case for committing infrastructure to the chain.
Coates is strolling right into a community already working at important monetary and transactional scale, which is exactly why the safety function carries actual weight.
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A Resume Constructed for This Second
Coates’s background is unusually well-matched to the crypto safety problem. He served as Head of Safety at Mozilla in the course of the browser competitors period, then turned Twitter’s inaugural CISO because the platform scaled to tons of of tens of millions of customers, constructing the safety perform from scratch in opposition to organized cybercrime and nation-state adversaries.
He later based Altitude Networks, a cloud information safety startup targeted on SaaS doc theft prevention, which was acquired by CoinList. That acquisition introduced Coates into the crypto sector instantly, the place he gained expertise with crypto infrastructure earlier than his transfer to Solana.

He additionally testified earlier than Congress earlier this 12 months on AI and cybersecurity, masking each the offensive dangers that AI poses to digital safety and the defensive potential of AI capabilities when used successfully, as he famous in his remarks. Either side of that equation are instantly related to his new function.
What He Will Really Do
On the Solana Basis, Coates mentioned his remit spans three areas: strengthening operational safety throughout the community, enhancing utility safety practices for builders, and interesting with policymakers and requirements our bodies on cybersecurity regulation affecting the crypto sector. He described the present menace setting plainly – attackers stay closely motivated to steal digital property, and malicious makes use of of synthetic intelligence have gotten an growing concern.
The governance infrastructure Coates will assist shield has grown extra subtle in latest months. Solana’s on-chain governance framework reportedly consists of staker override mechanisms that give token holders a direct verify on validator habits, the type of decentralized coordination system that requires hardened operational safety to perform as designed.
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