Donovan Hare is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Agant. In this role, he is positioned at the intersection of product strategy and engineering execution, with responsibilities that typically include building secure infrastructure, shipping customer-facing features, and maintaining operational reliability. For crypto and digital asset companies, the CTO function is closely tied to security posture, uptime, and the ability to integrate with rapidly evolving blockchain ecosystems.
Overview
As a co-founder, Hare’s remit is likely to span both long-term technology direction and short-term delivery. In early-stage crypto businesses, technical leadership often determines whether a team can move quickly without compromising safety, particularly when products interact with public blockchains, third-party wallets, exchanges, or on-chain smart contracts. The CTO role also tends to influence how a company approaches custody, data integrity, and incident response.
Role at Agant
As CTO, Hare would typically be responsible for setting engineering priorities, defining architecture, and establishing development standards. This can include selecting core infrastructure components, building internal tooling, and ensuring that product decisions align with technical constraints and security requirements. In many crypto organizations, the CTO also collaborates with legal and compliance teams to translate policy into technical controls, such as monitoring, audit logging, and transaction screening where applicable.
- Architecture and scalability: Designing systems that can handle variable demand, high throughput, and real-time data needs.
- Blockchain integrations: Managing node providers, RPC reliability, indexing, and multi-chain support strategies.
- Security engineering: Establishing secure SDLC practices, key management principles, and vulnerability management.
- Smart contract lifecycle: Oversight of testing, audits, upgrade strategy, and deployment processes when smart contracts are used.
- Operations and monitoring: Incident response playbooks, observability, and uptime targets for critical services.
- Product collaboration: Aligning engineering delivery with user needs, market timelines, and go-to-market requirements.
Technology and Features
Crypto products commonly combine on-chain components with off-chain services, such as APIs, databases, user authentication, and analytics. A CTO leading this type of stack must manage the boundary between deterministic blockchain execution and traditional cloud infrastructure, ensuring consistency across systems. Reliability and security are central concerns, because failures can create irreversible outcomes on public ledgers, or expose users to loss through compromised keys, flawed contract logic, or unsafe integrations.
Technical leadership in this environment also involves managing third-party dependencies, including custody partners, infrastructure providers, and audit firms, while maintaining clear accountability for risk. Establishing repeatable release processes, code review standards, and staged rollouts is often critical for reducing change-related incidents.
Use Cases and Market Context
Agant’s technology leadership sits within a broader market shaped by stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi), and staking. These segments have expanded the demand for infrastructure that is transparent, resilient, and auditable. Readers looking for background context can explore CryptoSlate’s overview of stablecoins, as well as frameworks for evaluating DeFi activity and common yield approaches such as staking and liquidity provision.
Across these areas, the technical bar is shaped by adversarial conditions. Public blockchains are permissionless, and production systems are continuously probed by attackers. This makes engineering discipline, threat modeling, and secure operational practices as important as product velocity.
Professional Focus
While detailed public information about Hare’s earlier career may be limited, the CTO role in a crypto company generally requires a blend of software engineering leadership and product judgment. This often includes experience with distributed systems, applied cryptography concepts, cloud operations, and secure development practices. As a co-founder, he would also be expected to shape the team’s engineering culture, hiring approach, and technical roadmap as the organization grows.
Risks and Considerations
CTOs operating in the digital asset sector must manage technical and operational risks that can be amplified by market volatility and fast-moving infrastructure changes. Key areas of risk typically include:
- Security incidents: Key compromise, integration vulnerabilities, and smart contract flaws can result in irreversible losses.
- Regulatory exposure: Product design may need to adapt to jurisdiction-specific rules and enforcement priorities.
- Dependency risk: Reliance on node providers, bridges, or third-party services can create single points of failure.
- Operational resilience: Downtime, degraded performance, or poor monitoring can undermine user trust and partner relationships.
In practice, the effectiveness of a CTO in crypto is often measured by the ability to ship safely, keep systems reliable under stress, and build processes that scale as the user base and product scope expand.
