Overview
- Michael Coates announced he joined the Solana Foundation as CISO on July 7, 2026, taking direct responsibility for network-wide security leadership.
- Coates built security teams at Mozilla and became Twitter’s first CISO before founding Altitude Networks, which was acquired by CoinList and connected him to crypto infrastructure.
- At Solana the CISO role will focus on strengthening operational controls for validators and infrastructure, improving application security for builders, and working with regulators and standards bodies.
- Coates cited Solana’s scale—including reportedly tens of billions of dollars in daily stablecoin volume and higher daily transaction throughput than most of the industry—as the key reason for joining and pointed to recent tokenization activity as evidence of real-world finance moving on-chain.
- The appointment fits a broader industry shift of hiring senior tech and regulatory leaders as crypto matures, and it raises expectations for tougher defenses against asset theft and AI-driven attacks and for clearer cybersecurity norms for digital assets.