Decentralised Digital Security E-book Out Now (Open Access)
In a world of hacks, scams, freezes, phishing, funding, incident research, and rescues, April 2026 was one of the worst months for cryptocurrency security in recent years. Approximately $651 million was lost to crypto exploits - the worst monthly total since March 2022, excluding the exceptional February 2025 Bybit exchange hack incident.
As one commentator on X put it: “Someone needs to stop this.”
This book examines who that “someone” actually is.
Decentralised Digital Security argues that blockchain security is not solely a technical problem solved through cryptography, audits, formal verification, or better wallet UX. Rather, it is a socio-technical pursuit shaped by an improvised network of responders, investigators, white hat hackers, protocol teams, security researchers, intelligence firms, exchanges, traditional authorities, and coordination groups operating across jurisdictions and platforms.
The book documents the emergence of this ad hoc security layer that now exists alongside the cryptoeconomic infrastructures typically associated with blockchain systems. It explores organisations such as the Security Alliance (SEAL), white hat recovery operations, blockchain sleuthing, nation-state attacks, kidnappings linked to digital assets, incident response coordination, and the evolving politics of “ethical” intervention in decentralised environments.
Chapters cover:
the historical foundations of decentralised security;
the contemporary blockchain security landscape;
how security coordination is organised across protocols and institutions;
geopolitical and physical attacks targeting crypto actors;
the February 2025 Bybit Hack as a case study in large-scale incident response; and
what blockchain security reveals about digital security more broadly.
A recurring theme throughout the book is that security cannot be reduced to code alone. As Vitalik Buterin recently argued:
“The goal is to minimize the divergence between the user’s intent, and the actual behavior of the system.”
Although Buterin goes on to reference technical guarantees and automation, this framing is important because it shifts security away from a narrow model of technical hardening toward a broader question of coordination, interpretation, and human judgment. Security failures emerge not only from flawed smart contracts, but from mismatches between human intention and machine execution: compromised interfaces, deceptive transaction flows, social engineering, operational failures, third-party dependencies, and adversarial manipulation of human trust. These repeated incidents make the persistent state of blockchain insecurity legible, and thus, in some ways addressable.
In this sense, blockchain security increasingly resembles a form of distributed crisis governance along the margins of social, technical, legal, and economic hardening in an effort to improve resilience (as I’ve written about in my work on vulnerability mapping and resilience). The industry’s response mechanisms, such as rescue operations, freeze coordination, exploit negotiations, intelligence sharing, ex anti legal protections, and rapid coordination, make visible that decentralised systems remain deeply dependent on networks of social trust and collective action, particularly under conditions of crisis. In this way, the public blockchain ecosystem has both replicated practices from traditional cybersecurity as well as produced new forms of institutional coordination native to distributed systems.
The e-book is now available open access.
Hardcover available: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526187086/.
You can also check out The DAO x Giveth quadratic funding round to support further research on this topic.