Solana Information: The Solana Basis has appointed Michael Coates, Twitter’s first-ever Chief Data Safety Officer and a veteran of Mozilla and enterprise SaaS safety, as its new CISO, a rent that alerts the Basis is treating safety as a boardroom precedence fairly 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, in response to Coates, was scale. He cited Solana’s tens of billions of {dollars} in day by day stablecoin quantity and its place processing extra transactions every day than many of the cryptocurrency trade 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, a knowledge 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 all the time been drawn to fast paced new frontiers. Head of Safety of Mozilla throughout the peak of the browser wars, the primary CISO of Twitter as they burst onto the world’s stage, and at the same time as a startup… pic.twitter.com/nrxtpxIKqZ
— Michael Coates (@_mwc) July 7, 2026
That exercise has been constructing steadily. In accordance with 99Bitcoins, Solana’s decentralized software income has reportedly grown for 9 consecutive quarters, giving institutional individuals and builders an more and more compelling case for committing infrastructure to the chain.
Coates is strolling right into a community already working at vital monetary and transactional scale, which is exactly why the safety position 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 throughout the browser competitors period, then grew to become Twitter’s inaugural CISO because the platform scaled to a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of customers, constructing the safety perform from scratch towards 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 immediately, the place he gained expertise with crypto infrastructure earlier than his transfer to Solana.
He additionally testified earlier than Congress earlier this yr on AI and cybersecurity, protecting 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. Each side of that equation are immediately related to his new position.
What He Will Truly Do
On the Solana Basis, Coates mentioned his remit spans three areas: strengthening operational safety throughout the community, enhancing software 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 rising concern.
The governance infrastructure Coates will assist defend 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 sort of decentralized coordination system that requires hardened operational safety to perform as designed.
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