CISO appointment
Michael Coates named Chief Information Security Officer at Solana Foundation
Michael Coates is the Chief Information Security Officer of Solana Foundation.
Records: Solana Foundation · Michael Coates · Career profile on CISO Spotlights ↗
| Person | Michael Coates |
|---|---|
| New role | Chief Information Security Officer |
| Company | Solana Foundation |
| Announced | week of July 6, 2026 |
| Source | SecurityWeek Industry Moves (week of July 6, 2026) |
Context from the record
- Solana Foundation is filed under Technology, North America, on our record.
Other Technology appointments in the third quarter of 2026
- Aditya Kumar, Chief Information Security Officer, InMobi Group
- Geoff Belknap, Chief Trust Officer, HubSpot
- Frank Krieger, Chief Information Security Officer, Swap
- Patrick McKinney, Chief Information Security Officer, Turing
- Robert Wood, Chief Information Security Officer, TiDB
- Thomas Coudray, Chief Information Security Officer, Mistral AI
- Patti Degnan, Chief Information Security Officer, Glow
- Erika Dean, Chief Information Security Officer, Tricentis
16 on our record that quarter. Who runs security in Technology.
What this move signals
The Solana Foundation appointed Michael Coates as Chief Information Security Officer, as announced the week of July 6, 2026. The announced date reflects the week of publication; the exact announcement day may differ by a few days.
A foundation-level CISO in a major blockchain ecosystem carries an unusual mandate: the security perimeter isn't a corporate network but a protocol, its validator ecosystem, and billions of dollars in on-chain value. It's one of the few CISO seats where a single class of bug is directly convertible to attacker profit at scale.
SecurityWeek's Industry Moves column for the week of July 6, 2026 says the Solana Foundation has appointed Michael Coates as Chief Information Security Officer. The entry is one of several appointments listed in that week's roundup, and it gives no start date and no description of what the role covers.
According to the announcement, Coates previously served as CISO at Twitter, which it describes as now X. It also says he led security at Mozilla and product security at Shape Security.
The announcement adds that Coates was board chairman at the OWASP Foundation. It gives no tenure figures or dates for any of these earlier roles, and it does not quote Coates or anyone at the Solana Foundation.
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