Solana Foundation Names Michael Coates as Its First Chief Information Security Officer

The Solana Foundation has hired Michael Coates as its first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), adding a formal senior security leadership role to an organization that has been building out its ecosystem-level security programs over the past year. Coates announced the appointment on X on July 7, 2026, and the Solana Foundation confirmed the hire shortly after.

Michael Coates: From Twitter's First CISO to Solana Foundation

Coates brings two decades of cybersecurity leadership, shaped primarily by building security programs at internet platforms operating at large scale before security was standard practice.

He served as Head of Security at Mozilla during what he has called "the height of the browser wars," protecting the Firefox user base across a period of rapid browser competition. He then became the first CISO of Twitter, establishing the company's information security program from scratch during a period of rapid growth and heightened threat exposure. Before moving into crypto, Coates served as Director of Product Security at Shape Security and as Chairman of the Board of the OWASP Foundation, the world's largest nonprofit organization dedicated to application security. SC Magazine named him one of its "Influential Security Minds."

His entry into crypto came through a startup he founded. Coates co-founded Altitude Networks, a venture-backed company focused on protecting enterprise cloud collaboration platforms including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Following Altitude Networks' acquisition by CoinList in 2022, he became COO and CISO of CoinList, which is how he describes finding his way into the crypto industry. Most recently he co-founded Seven Hill Ventures, a cybersecurity-focused venture firm backing early-stage companies in the United States and Israel. He has also testified before Congress on the national security risks of malicious AI use.

Why Coates Chose Solana: Scale, Stablecoins, and Tokenized Assets

In his announcement, Coates pointed to the network's current transaction scale and institutional activity as central to his reasoning. Solana SOL$119.01+0.2% is "processing more transactions daily than most of crypto combined," he wrote, citing stablecoin volumes in the tens of billions of dollars daily and recent tokenized-equity milestones on the chain.

He also flagged the security challenges that come with that scale: sophisticated adversaries targeting crypto holders, and the growing offensive use of AI in cyberattacks, which he views as the two most acute threat categories he plans to address.

He identified three priorities for the role: building security into the ecosystem from "operational and appsec fundamentals to the crypto-specific challenges," working with policymakers and standards bodies to shape cybersecurity regulation for the industry, and applying experience accumulated at large-scale internet companies to the specific pressures that arise when innovative approaches meet established institutional counterparties.

STRIDE, SIRN, and the Security Programs Coates Inherits

The CISO hire gives a named executive to a security build-out the Foundation began in earnest in early 2026.

In April, the Foundation launched STRIDE (Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises) in partnership with Asymmetric Research. The program evaluates protocols against eight security pillars, provides 24/7 threat monitoring for protocols with more than $10 million in total value locked, and funds formal verification for protocols above $100 million TVL. Alongside STRIDE, the Foundation launched SIRN, the Solana Incident Response Network, a membership-based group including Asymmetric Research, OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow. Asymmetric Research published STRIDE's first findings on July 1, 2026, after 12 weeks of active protocol evaluation.

The Foundation has also made free security tooling available to ecosystem projects, including threat detection through Hypernative and real-time risk monitoring through Range Security.

Coates joins as those programs move past launch into ongoing operations, with no prior CISO in place to lead them.