Solana Foundation CISO: AI Is Making Crypto Scams More Convincing
Michael Coates, the Solana Foundation's security chief and former Twitter CISO, warns in a CoinDesk interview: AI-powered social engineering with deepfakes and cloned voices will get much worse — and most hacks don't start on-chain.
What Happened
Michael Coates, Chief Information Security Officer of the Solana Foundation since earlier this year, gave CoinDesk an interview on the threat landscape in crypto. Coates was previously CISO at Twitter and led security at Mozilla. At the foundation, he is responsible for securing the organization itself, working with ecosystem projects, and engaging with regulators.
The Core Message: Social Engineering Gets Worse With AI
Coates sees the biggest growing danger not in smart contract bugs but at the human layer: “The social engineering piece is going to get a lot worse because of the power of AI and deepfakes,” he told CoinDesk. He warns of fully spoofed phone calls using the voices of people you know — and sees no reason such attacks won’t scale massively.
That matches his read on where damage actually originates: many incidents, per Coates, trace back to operational security failures or compromised Web2 accounts that lead to key loss — not to flaws in the blockchain itself.
What Coates Recommends as Defense
Coates’ approach relies on structure rather than awareness alone: you cannot fully prevent anyone from being fooled. Systems should therefore have multiple security layers — when one person gets deceived, the other layers take over. And: security has to meet users where they are — with secure defaults instead of expecting every user to be a security expert.
What the most common attack patterns look like at the wallet level is covered in our explainers Detecting Wallet Drainers and Solana Wallet Security.
Also on the Table: Quantum Readiness
Coates confirmed that the Solana Foundation is evaluating post-quantum algorithms — with the open problem that nobody knows when “Q-day” will hit. The technical side of that preparation is already public: Anza’s quantum resistance roadmap and, most recently, the Quantumglow design for Alpenglow.
Note: This is reporting, not investment advice.
What to Watch
- Which concrete security initiatives the foundation launches under Coates
- Whether wallets and apps in the ecosystem push secure defaults further toward the standard
- How AI-assisted fraud patterns develop over the coming months
Sources
- CoinDesk — Solana Foundation’s New CISO Warns AI Is Making Crypto Scams More Convincing
- SOLANA·HUB knowledge: Detecting Wallet Drainers · Solana Wallet Security