Digital Trust and Security Webinar: Dr Zhipeng Wang & Dr Joseph Lee Nazzini

Talk Title: DAO Governance Takeover Attack on the blockchain: Code as Law, Cybersecurity and Governance

In this talk, Dr Zhipeng Wang and Dr Joseph Lee Nazzini analyse the DAO governance takeover attack as a major governance-level cybersecurity risk in blockchain systems, drawing on several cases, primarily the DAO Hack. Using historical examples, they demonstrate how flaws in both smart-contract code and governance design can create the conditions for DAO attacks. They further discuss how attacks on application-layer DAOs can, under certain circumstances, propagate systemic risks to the underlying blockchain. The talk also contrasts DAO governance attacks with 51% and other majority-based attacks on the consensus layer. Finally, they examine how code-as-law operates in the blockchain ecosystem, particularly in the context of DAOs, conceptualise what constitutes a ‘bug’ in deployed code, and propose measures to mitigate these cybersecurity risks.

Speaker Biographies:

Dr Zhipeng Wang is a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Imperial College London, where he also completed his PhD.

His research focuses on privacy and security in decentralised and distributed computing systems, with particular emphasis on blockchain and decentralized AI systems, as well as the cryptographic primitives and protocols that underpin them. His current research interests include:

• Blockchain: privacy, security, consensus, and applications
• Applied cryptography: classical and post-quantum approaches
• Decentralized AI: security, privacy, and incentive mechanisms

Dr Joseph Lee is a Reader in Corporate and Financial law at the University of Manchester School of Law. He was a senior lecturer in corporate and commercial law at the University of Exeter UK and assistant professor of law at the University of Nottingham UK, which he joined immediately after the completion of his PhD at the University of London.

He is the founding programme director of the Manchester Online LLM in International Commercial and Technology Law. He is the author of Crypto-Finance, Law and Regulation: Governing an Emerging Ecosystem (2021) and the editor of several influential books including Web3 Governance: Law and Policy (2025); A Research Agenda for Financial Law and Regulation (2025); and Data Governance in AI, FinTech and LegalTech: Law and Regulation in the Financial Sector (2022).

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The Centre for Digital Trust and Society organises the DTS Guest Seminar Series and is a focal point for research across the University of Manchester that explores aspects of trust and security in our digital world. The Centre is part of Digital Futures, a highly interdisciplinary network which operates across the whole range of the University of Manchester's digital research.

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