Michael Coates

CISO @SolanaFndn | Cyber Investing Seven Hill Ventures - Former: CISO @Twitter, @Mozilla, @Coinlist, Chairman @OWASP, Startup Founder (Acquired)

[Michael Coates @_mwc]

Honored to testify to Homeland Security and joint session on AI, Quantum and Cybersecurity. Full info below

[Lily Liu @calilyliu]

Solana started in San Francisco developer communities

it is time to get back to our roots

we're staging a revival and we'll do whatever is required to bring our hometown into the vision of internet capital markets; the vision of using blockchain to build native economies around open source development

[Michael Coates @_mwc]

@NeiroWoof @SolanaFndn 💪

[Michael Coates @_mwc]

Big Update for me - a new chapter and I'm now CISO of @SolanaFndn .

I've always been drawn to fast moving new frontiers. Head of Security of Mozilla during the height of the browser wars, the first CISO of Twitter as they burst onto the world's stage, and even as a startup founder innovating on data security for enterprise SaaS as cloud deployments skyrocketed. Years ago through the acquisition of our startup, Altitude Networks, to CoinList I found my way into crypto.

I'm excited to share that I'm continuing the crypto adventure as CISO of Solana Foundation.

Why Solana?

This is the chain doing tens of billions of dollars in stablecoin volume a day. It's the chain where SpaceX's tokenized shares went live the same day as its Nasdaq debut. It's processing more transactions daily than most of crypto combined. Solana is establishing itself as the future of financial infrastructure, at massive scale.

Now, this is not without its challenges. I'm keenly aware of the adversaries' incentive to separate people from their crypto. I'm aware of the rising threats from malicious use of AI (something I testified to Congress about earlier this year), and the massive power for defense when harnessed effectively. And I’ve felt the push and pull when innovative new approaches meet established traditional businesses.

I'm thrilled to work across the foundation and the entire Solana ecosystem to help tackle these challenges head on. That means building security into this industry, from operational and appsec fundamentals to the crypto-specific challenges, working with policymakers and standards bodies to get cybersecurity regulation right, and bringing the lessons and battle scars I've picked up along the way.

Innovation is messy and security is hard. This is the nexus where I enjoy working to solve the hardest challenges alongside the smartest folks around the world.

Onward!

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Lettre à l'Amérique, d'un Français qui a vu la fin du film.

Vous vous croyez encore le dernier pays libre. Vous l'êtes pour l'instant. Je vous écris depuis un pays qui l'était aussi, et qui a signé sa reddition sans qu'un seul coup de feu ne soit tiré.

En France, l'État capte et redistribue 57% de tout ce que la nation produit. Cinquante-sept pour cent. Arrêtez-vous sur ce chiffre. Pour chaque unité de valeur créée par un ingénieur, un ouvrier, un fondateur qui a risqué sa peau, plus de la moitié transite par une main qui n'a rien bâti. Ce n'est pas une ligne budgétaire. C'est une hypothèque permanente sur l'existence des gens.

Et voici ce que personne ne vous avouera : ça n'arrive jamais par la révolution. Personne ne vote pour le déclin. On vote pour la compassion, pour la sécurité, pour la justice, pour la planète. À chaque étape, on troque un morceau de liberté contre une promesse. Et les promesses sont toujours belles. C'est ça, le piège.

Le collectivisme d'aujourd'hui n'agite plus le drapeau rouge il a compris que ça ne se vend plus. Il a appris à parler la langue du soin. ESG, gouvernance, conformité, « responsabilité » : ce sont les mots nouveaux d'une très vieille idée. L'idée qu'une élite éclairée sait mieux que vous ce qui est bon pour vous, et qu'il faut donc lui transférer, ligne après ligne, le pouvoir de décider à votre place. Ce n'est pas un complot. C'est pire : c'est un consensus. Personne ne se cache. Tout se fait à visage découvert, applaudi, subventionné.

Hayek l'avait écrit il y a quatre-vingts ans : la route de la servitude est pavée de bonnes intentions et de planification centralisée. La France a marché sur cette route en souriant. On a nationalisé le risque, socialisé l'échec, taxé l'audace, et administré tout le reste. Résultat : un pays magnifique qui ne construit plus rien, qui gère sa décrépitude avec une élégance funèbre, et où le jeune le plus doué rêve d'une seule chose partir. Beaucoup atterrissent chez vous.

L'Amérique a encore ce que nous avons perdu : le réflexe de bâtir plutôt que d'administrer. Le fondateur y est un héros, pas un suspect. La réussite y est une preuve, pas une faute à expier. C'est votre trésor. Et un trésor, ça se perd sans qu'on s'en aperçoive un formulaire, une agence, une « bonne cause » à la fois.

Alors ne cherchez pas d'ennemis cachés. C'est inutile et c'est indigne de vous. Regardez plutôt le chiffre. Regardez la France. Chaque point de PIB que vous laissez glisser vers l'État est un point de liberté qui ne revient jamais.

La liberté ne meurt pas assassinée. Elle meurt anesthésiée, sous les applaudissements.

Ne signez pas. Construisez.

[Yarchi @undefinedKi]

https://t.co/CYsv4s0Ane

[asymmetric research @asymmetric_re]

12 weeks into STRIDE, we're sharing a first look at the state of Solana security.

[Stripe @stripe]

We’re making Open USD the default for businesses using stablecoins on Stripe. Coming soon.

[Solana @solana]

BREAKING: Open USD is launching natively on Solana from day one.

A new shared stablecoin, owned and governed by its partners. No mint or redeem fees, no volume caps, and nearly all the reserve economics flow back to the businesses building it.

[Steve Everley @saeverley]

Data center water use, contextualized

(chart via @axios)

[DeFi Education Fund @fund_defi]

Calling CISOs and security experts 📣

Join us to advance security best practices onchain. It starts with a pledge.

https://t.co/0wLTeSfAnN

[DeFi Education Fund @fund_defi]

Introducing OPSeC: a new industry-wide initiative we're convening in partnership with @_SEAL_Org & @asymmetric_re to improve cybersecurity resilience across blockchain ecosystems & onchain software.

Join us to ensure security is at the heart of onchain technology development.

[Michael Coates @_mwc]

@solana @alpha_ledger 🚀

[Solana @solana]

BREAKING: @awscloud content publishers can monetize AI traffic and get paid with stablecoins over @x402 on Solana.

Instead of blocking bots (which account for up to 50% of traffic), publishers can set a per-request price for access, and get paid with USDC.

[thinkingcap @chrisheatherly]

I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.

The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.

There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.

What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.

Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.

This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.

That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.

What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.

Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?

No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.

[Quantus @QuantusNetwork]

"If the cryptography breaks, there is no reason to use a blockchain. You can go home."

@YuviLightman at QDay.

Google now estimates 1,200 logical qubits to break Bitcoin keys.

Standards bodies set their first deadlines for 2028.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

https://t.co/puLXpatHvd

[Pankaj @the2ndfloorguy]

i hooked my whoop to my work calendar to find which coworker gives me the most stress 🚨

thanks to fable, I reverse engineered whoop to pull per minute heart rate. nd matched spikes with cal events and attendees

I now have a leaderboard and I think about it daily.

few info masked for obvious reasons ;)

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

I wrote a new post about the privacy risks of on-phone agents like Apple’s new Siri, and how private inference isn’t any sort of silver bullet. https://t.co/91ydRo9HRn

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[Vivek | Cybersecurity @VivekIntel]

Anthropic just open-sourced a reference framework for AI-powered vulnerability discovery and remediation 🤖💀

The workflow:

Recon → Find → Verify → Triage → Report → Patch

Features:
• Threat modeling
• Autonomous vulnerability hunting
• Crash verification
• Finding deduplication
• Exploitability analysis
• AI-generated patches with validation

Built around Claude Code and sandboxed agents using gVisor.

🔗 https://t.co/ZFOtXZPEn8

Interesting signal: AI is moving beyond code generation into autonomous security research and vulnerability management.

#CyberSecurity #AppSec #AI #LLM #VulnerabilityManagement #DevSecOps #ClaudeAI