Foundation’s new CISO flags AI vulnerabilities and fake identities as blockchain security risks

Crypto’s biggest security threat is shifting away from smart contract flaws and toward AI-driven social engineering, identity spoofing and compromised credentials, Michael Coates told CoinDesk in his role as the Solana Foundation’s chief information security officer. He said many high-profile attacks originate in Web2 operational mistakes rather than core blockchain code, warning that tools such as deepfake voice calls could make deception easier to scale. Coates, who joined the foundation earlier this year after previous security roles at Twitter and Mozilla, said Solana is also evaluating post-quantum cryptography and has its own strategy for quantum computing risks. He argued that the industry’s security model must protect users by default rather than expect them to act as security experts, underscoring how crypto risk is broadening from protocol exploits to identity, operations and longer-term infrastructure threats.