Despite being built for resilience, blockchain projects remain vulnerable to cyberattacks, especially those targeting individual projects and cross-chain bridges.
In recent years, these weak spots have cost the industry billions. A new San Francisco startup, Octane, believes artificial intelligence can help stem the bleeding.
In 2024, hackers stole approximately $2.2 billion worth of crypto through exploits. Just four months into 2025, that figure has already nearly been matched, underscoring the urgency of better security.
Launched in 2023, Octane is led by San Francisco-based software engineer and CEO Giovanni Vignone, who believes the blockchain industry can no longer afford to sideline cybersecurity.
“Throughout my time in crypto, I’ve seen countless hacks and exploits. There’s a huge problem—over $11 billion has been drained from the ecosystem,” Vignone told Decrypt. “Despite teams spending $50,000 to $200,000 a year on securing codebases, hacks keep happening.”
The growing cybercrime epidemic targeting the blockchain space led Vignone to develop Octane, an AI-powered code auditor that assists developers in real time by identifying vulnerabilities as they write.
Octane integrates directly into the GitHub pipeline, running continuously as developers write code. It automatically summarizes API pull requests, flags potential vulnerabilities, and helps teams identify exploits early, maximizing their ability to fix critical bugs and address lower-severity issues.
On Tuesday, Octane announced it had closed a $6.7 million funding round to expand its operations. The round was led by Winklevoss Capital and crypto investment firm Archetype, and participants included Druid Ventures, Circle, Gemini, Legion Capital, Duke Capital Partners, among others.
“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.
Vignone said Octane was initially designed for the Solidity programming language and Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible projects. The team plans to expand support to Solana and 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
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