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The seventh session of the Distributed Ledger Technology Seminar Series, hosted by UK CBT and supported by Exponential Science on 20 November 2025, featured Dr Kaihua Qin, who examined security risks in blockchain systems with a focus on Maximal Extractable Value and automated attack strategies.
Dr. Qin explained how public visibility of pending transactions and miner control over ordering enables front running, sandwich attacks, arbitrage, and liquidations. More than $540M was extracted from Ethereum users between 2018 and 2021, illustrating that MEV is a significant real-world issue rather than a theoretical concern.
Dr. Qin also introduced imitation attacks, where automated bots copy profitable transactions without understanding their logic. Dr. Qin presented APE, a system that reverse engineers smart contracts and front-runs victims within fractions of a second. Research shows that such automated exploitation could have generated over 190 million dollars across major chains in one year. Defensive white hat applications were also discussed.
The session concluded with a discussion on potential mitigations, including encrypted mempools, random transaction ordering, and improved auditing methods, while recognising that MEV remains a difficult open problem in blockchain security.
The DLT Seminar Series brings together industry experts and researchers to share technical insights on distributed ledger technologies.
Next and Final Session of the Year
Join the eighth session of the DLT Seminar Series, held live online via Microsoft Teams. Kodey Kilday Thomas, Senior Software Engineer from Chainlink Labs will present on ‘Solving the Oracle Problem,’ covering CCIP, OCR, and how Chainlink technologies connect smart contracts with real-world data and enable secure cross-chain communication.
The event will take place on Thursday, 27 November 2025, from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. GMT. Registration is open here.
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