Blockchain projects are vulnerable to cyberattacks despite being designed for resilience. These attacks can be directed at individual projects or cross-chain links.
These weak points have caused the industry to lose billions in recent years. Octane is a new San Francisco-based startup that believes artificial intelligence will help stop the bleeding.
Hackers stole $2.2 billion in crypto by exploiting vulnerabilities. In just four months of 2025, this figure is almost identical, underscoring how urgent it is to improve security.
Octane will be launched in 2023 by Giovanni Vignone. He is a software engineer from San Francisco and the CEO of Octane. Vignone believes that cybersecurity cannot afford to be ignored within the blockchain sector.
“Over the course of my career in crypto I have seen many hacks and exploits. There’s a huge problem—over $11 billion has been drained from the ecosystem,” Vignone told Decrypt. Hacks continue to occur despite the fact that teams spend $50,000-$200,000 annually on protecting code bases.
Vignone developed Octane as a result of the growing cybercrime targeting blockchain developers. Octane is an AI code auditor which assists in real-time by identifying security vulnerabilities while they are writing.
Octane runs in the background as developers work on code. Octane summarizes API requests and flags vulnerabilities. It helps teams to identify exploits earlier, maximising their ability fix critical bugs or address less-severe issues.
Octane, a company that expands its business operations with the help of funding, announced on Tuesday it closed a round of $6.7 million. Winklevoss Capital was the lead investor, followed by Archetype and Crypto Investments. Druid Ventures as well as Circle, Gemini and Duke Capital Partners were also participants.
"The importance of making crypto applications more secure is obvious, and Gio and his world-class team have built just the platform to meet this need and help crypto devs and crypto companies ship more secure code,” Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss said in a statement.
Octane, according to Vignone, was originally designed for projects compatible with the Solidity language of programming and Ethereum Virtual Machine. The team is planning to add support for Solana as well as other blockchains.
Looking ahead, Vignone said Octane’s long-term vision goes beyond catching bugs—redefining how security is built into the development process.
“Our goal at Octane is to build the future of security by bringing every crypto team an AI security engineer—trained on millions of exploits and data points—who specializes in identifying vulnerabilities and helping developers triage them,” he said.
Edited By Sebastian Sinclair
