An internet service provider built at thirteen, a bank security career he walked away from, and one of Web3’s busiest offensive security firms. The newest member of the FIO Board of Directors argues that security and usability are not two problems but one.
Sipan Vardanyan has been elected to the FIO Board of Directors. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Hexens, a security firm whose work spans large protocols, centralized exchanges, whole blockchains, and the cryptography underneath them. Before that he spent his career defending banks, ending as a chief information security officer.
He arrives with a blunt argument. The two things holding this industry back are security and usability, and of the two, usability may be the worse problem.
An internet provider at thirteen, then the bank
He started young. At thirteen he built one of the first high-speed internet service providers in his hometown in Armenia, in the window right after people lost their patience with dial-up connections.
Banking came next, five or six years across several institutions, first in senior IT and then as chief information security officer. He is direct about how that chapter ended.
“The day I left, I promised myself I’m not going to work in a bank a single day more.”
What pulled him out was offensive security, the practice of attacking a system yourself to find out how it fails before somebody else does. He and Vahe Karapetyan, a friend who would go on to co-found Hexens with him, had become convinced that decentralized finance, mostly on Ethereum at the time, was where that work was heading.
Hexens, and the exploits nobody has found yet
Hexens came out of that conviction, founded by the two of them. He describes it as a full-spectrum offensive security boutique, working with the largest protocols in the space, with centralized exchanges, with entire blockchains, and on cryptographic security. The firm has just launched Glider Monitor, which Hexens describes as the first continuous threat exposure management system built for Web3.
His read on the current wave of exploits is the part worth sitting with.
“People falsely think that if something is not getting hacked right now, it’s basically safe. It’s just not being targeted yet.”
The tooling has changed, and not in defenders’ favor.
“AI just lowers the entry bar for anybody who wants to do anything. Also black hat stuff. So it’s easier than ever right now to hack stuff.”
That is a security professional describing an environment where old code gets re-examined by cheaper and faster attackers. Bugs that sat untouched for years are now worth someone’s afternoon.
Why FIO
He came to FIO through a friend, then put his own team on researching it before saying yes.
“There is basically so much upside and so much potential in this, because we see how institutional money is already finding its own way into the Web3.”
What that research turned up was a market shifting underneath the protocol.
“Web3 is not Web3 anymore. It’s kind of merging with the traditional finance. I believe we’re going to end up somewhere in Web 2.5, maybe just a tiny bit higher.”
He has been in crypto for over a decade, long enough to recognize the shape of what follows institutional money. Retail interest comes behind it, and the people arriving in that wave have no patience for the current experience. That, in his reading, is FIO’s opening, if the protocol is positioned and executed well.
Security and usability are the same problem
Start with the security half, which is his profession.
“We’re so dependent on a single line of code. A single line of code that is written wrong can lead to hundreds of millions of dollars being stolen.”
Then the turn, and it is not the one you would expect from a career security specialist.
“The usual people, they don’t want to understand how the blockchain works. They don’t want to actually do the research and understand which blockchain is faster or which one is better. Is it easy to use? Is it intuitive? Is it doing what I wanted to do? That’s the main questions that we need to answer. And technology should lie on the back end. You don’t need to see that.”
That is FIO’s design premise, stated by someone who came to it from the outside. A FIO Handle is one human-readable name that resolves to a user’s real wallet addresses across supported chains. The mapping lives onchain, the sender types a name instead of a long string of characters, and the complexity stays where it belongs, underneath.
The reputation problem
The harder inheritance is trust. His account of it is unsentimental: people lost money to pump and dumps, to scam coins, to honeypots, and the specific mechanism stopped mattering to them a long time ago.
“What you’re going to say to a person who lost all his life savings on some random stuff he didn’t fully and completely understand? It’s really, really hard to change that. And that’s going to be one of the goals that we as a community have to try solving.”
Naming this as board-level work, rather than a marketing problem, is a useful signal about how he intends to operate.
What he came to do
Asked for closing words to the FIO community, he offered a warning about how controversial it might sound, then said this.
“I kind of don’t even care about any tokens out there. What I care about is creating value. If I can help you guys to create more value for the end users, if I can be helpful at that mission, that would be a huge goal for me.”
And on how growth actually arrives.
“Compounding value for the community is the number one driver for the growth. It’s not fake marketing. It’s not the advertisement budget that you have. It’s: are our users going to love it, are they going to recommend it to their friends. Let’s build something that will last.”
What this means for holders
Your FIO Handles continue to work. Nothing in this transition changes what you already hold. Registration continues at app.fio.net, domains at app.fio.net/fio-domain, and FIO remains available across supported partners and exchanges.
Full board election results and vote counts are at fio.net/discover/fio-board-elections.
The long view
What Sipan brings to the board is a particular kind of skepticism. He has spent his working life looking for the line of code that fails, and he applies the same attention to the gap between what a protocol claims and what a person can actually do with it. Both of those are questions about whether a thing works. He treats them as one job.
Sipan Vardanyan is the second guest on Meet the FIO Board of Directors, the series introducing the people now steering the protocol. He sat down with Wayne Marcel to talk through his path from bank security into Web3, what Hexens sees in the current exploit wave, and why usability is the harder problem. Watch the episode here.
Meet Sipan Vardanyan: The Security Veteran on FIO’s New Board was originally published in FIO Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.