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 indicators the Basis is treating safety as a boardroom precedence moderately 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 every day stablecoin quantity and its place processing extra transactions every day than a lot of the cryptocurrency business mixed because the deciding elements.
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 rapidly 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 through 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. Based on 99Bitcoins, Solana’s decentralized software income has reportedly grown for 9 consecutive quarters, giving institutional members 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 through the browser competitors period, then grew to become Twitter’s inaugural CISO because the platform scaled to tons of of tens of millions of customers, constructing the safety operate from scratch towards organized cybercrime and nation-state adversaries.
He later based Altitude Networks, a cloud knowledge safety startup centered 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 12 months on AI and cybersecurity, overlaying 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 immediately related to his new position.
What He Will Really 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 surroundings 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 examine on validator conduct, the type of decentralized coordination system that requires hardened operational safety to operate as designed.
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