vCISO — A vCISO is fractional security leadership: an experienced security executive who sets your strategy, builds the policies and processes, owns vendor and incident readiness, and reports to your board — at a fraction of the cost and lead time of a full-time CISO hire.
Most Web3 teams reach a point where security stops being a series of audits and becomes an operating requirement: an exchange asks for your security policy, an investor asks who owns incident response, a partner sends a 200-question vendor assessment, and nobody internally owns any of it.
We provide that ownership without the hire. Practically: a risk assessment and roadmap, the policies and standards you actually need (not a template pack), security built into your SDLC, vendor and third-party risk, incident response planning with rehearsed runbooks, and board-level reporting that a non-technical director can act on.
We fix a commit hash, agree the in-scope contracts and read your architecture docs, then build a threat model: who the actors are, what the trust boundaries are, and which invariants must never break. Nothing is reviewed against assumptions we have not written down.
Line-by-line review by at least two auditors working independently, focused on authorisation, accounting, upgrade paths, external integrations and the gap between what the code does and what the documentation claims it does. Most critical findings come from this phase, not from tooling.
Static analysers appropriate to the language, plus property-based fuzzing and invariant testing to push the system into states no unit test covers. Tooling is used to widen coverage, never to replace the manual pass.
Candidate findings are proven on a forked network with a working proof of concept. We report what an attacker can actually do and what it costs them, not a theoretical severity label.
Every finding gets a severity rating, reproduction steps, the affected code, the impact in concrete terms and a specific remediation. You get a draft for discussion before anything is finalised.
We re-test every remediation against the original proof of concept and check that the fix has not opened a new path. The final report is yours to publish.
| Severity | What it means |
|---|---|
| Critical | Direct loss of funds or permanent freezing of assets, exploitable by any actor. |
| High | Loss of funds or protocol insolvency under realistic conditions, or requiring a privileged actor to misbehave. |
| Medium | Broken protocol behaviour, denial of service, or value leakage that does not directly drain the contract. |
| Low | Edge-case incorrectness with limited impact, or an issue requiring implausible preconditions. |
| Informational | Code quality, gas efficiency, documentation mismatch and defence-in-depth suggestions. |
Single token contract: starts from $999, report in 24–48 hours. dApp, GameFi or RWA project: starts from $2,999. DeFi protocol, L2 / rollup, Bridge, ZK circuit, AI agent / MCP: scoped per project after we have seen the code.
Owns the security roadmap, runs design and release reviews, maintains policy and evidence, handles vendor assessments and incoming security questionnaires, keeps the incident plan current and rehearsed, and reports position and progress to your board.
Engagements are sized in days per month, typically two to eight depending on stage and obligations. You get a named person, not a rotating queue.
Yes — we build the control set and evidence, then work with your chosen certification body or auditor. We prepare; they certify.
The vCISO engagement is leadership and process. Audits, penetration tests and forensics are separate engagements, though having the same firm across both removes a lot of translation overhead.
A repository or contract address, a commit hash to freeze the scope, whatever architecture or spec documentation exists, and a point of contact who can answer design questions. If documentation is thin we will write our understanding of the system back to you and ask you to confirm it — that step alone catches design-level bugs.
A single token contract is 24–48 hours. A typical dApp or mid-sized protocol runs one to two weeks. Large DeFi systems, L2s, bridges and ZK circuits are scoped per project after we have seen the code. We will give you a fixed timeline with the quote, not an estimate that moves.
Yes. Fix review is part of the engagement, not an upsell. We re-run the original proof of concept against your patched code and confirm the fix has not introduced a new path.
Send the repository and a commit hash through the contact form, message @bugtester25 on Telegram, or book a 30-minute scoping call. 200+ protocols audited · $4B+ secured · 0 hacks post-audit. Prefer email? info@safeedges.in.