Michael Coates said he has taken the role of chief information security officer (CISO) at the Solana Foundation. According to Foresight News, Coates announced the appointment in a post on X.
Coates previously served as head of security at Mozilla and as CISO at Twitter. He also founded Altitude Networks, a startup focused on enterprise SaaS data security that was later acquired by CoinList, which he said marked his entry into the crypto industry.
Coates said he chose to join Solana because the network’s daily stablecoin transaction volume is in the tens of billions of dollars, and its daily transaction volume exceeds the combined total of most cryptocurrencies.
He said his work will focus on embedding security capabilities into industry operations and application security foundations, addressing security challenges specific to cryptocurrencies, and working with policymakers and standards bodies to support improvements in cybersecurity regulation.