Hey, it’s Gio.

Last time, I shared why we’re building Octane and why crypto security needs to move faster.

But speed isn’t the only issue.

The bigger problem is that most teams still think of security as a one-time event.

You write code for months.
You hand it off to an audit firm.
You wait a few weeks.
You get a long PDF back.
You patch what’s flagged.
You launch.

And you hope nothing critical slipped through.

I’ve seen this cycle play out too many times, even at teams spending six figures on audits. The truth is, even good auditors miss things. Humans get fatigued. They’re scanning thousands of lines of code for hundreds of attack vectors. Some audit firms have A-level talent, but many times your repo gets handed off to junior staff. And every code change you make after the audit can open up entirely new vulnerabilities that may never get re-reviewed.

That’s where Octane comes in.

We’ve always believed security isn’t something you tack on at the end, it’s something you build into the process from the start.

Instead of waiting until dev is "done" to start scanning for bugs, we integrate directly into your GitHub workflow from day one.

Every pull request gets scanned automatically.
Every new code change gets reviewed before it hits mainnet.
And our security experts are available to review complex findings as issues come up.

By embedding security directly into the development process, you catch issues earlier—when they’re faster, cheaper, and safer to fix—rather than scrambling days before launch.

A simple example of why shift-left matters

Recently, one team we onboarded had just wrapped up a manual audit with a major firm. The auditors had reviewed the code and signed off, missing what turned out to be a serious flaw in their swap execution logic.

The developers had integrated Uniswap but failed to require a minTokenOut parameter on swap calls. That meant the swap function could execute trades without sufficient slippage protection, exposing users to frontrunning attacks that could drain their entire balances during volatile price swings.

It’s the kind of bug that’s easy to miss in a one-time code review, but deadly if left in production.

When this code ran through Octane’s models, our AI flagged the issue immediately—within seconds—because the system is trained to spot exactly these types of slippage and frontrunning risks. The vulnerability was caught before deployment, and the team was able to patch the logic before users ever interacted with the contract.

This is the power of shift-left security:

→ Catching vulnerabilities when they’re introduced.
→ Fixing them while the code is still fresh.
→ Shipping with confidence that issues aren’t hiding deep in your stack.

What shift-left looks like in practice

Shift-left isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a change in how security fits into the entire dev lifecycle:

• Design: Threat modeling early to anticipate risks before any code is written.

• Development: Continuous automated scanning as code is written and updated.

• Testing: Integrated code scanning tech like Octane and end to end integration testing with Foundry.

• Deployment: Layered human reviews + bug bounty coverage post-launch.

This constant feedback loop keeps your security posture improving with every commit,  instead of trying to play catch-up months later when things are much harder (and more expensive) to fix.

We break this shift-left model down in more detail here if you want to dive deeper:

In future issues, I’ll share more real-world examples of vulnerabilities we’ve caught and how teams were able to patch them before launch.

Have any questions on the shift left approach? Reply to this email - I’d love to chat.

More soon,
Gio

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