The New Shape of Attacks
Blockchains built for low fees and high throughput change more than user experience. They change the economics of abuse. When transactions are cheap and blocks are frequent, attackers gain a capability defenders often underestimate: the ability to rehearse in production.
On higher fee environments, repeated failed attempts are expensive. Each reverted call, each parameter tweak, each ordering attempt carries real cost. On low fee networks, that cost drops sharply. What used to be a constrained experiment becomes an iterative workflow. Attackers can probe contracts continuously, measure responses, and refine payloads in real time with minimal financial friction.
This is not an argument that any one chain is less secure by design. It is an argument about incentives. Throughput and fee structures shape adversary behavior. If defenders do not adjust their assumptions accordingly, they will keep tuning controls for the wrong signals.
When rehearsal is cheap, production becomes the learning environment
Traditional security framing treats the exploit as the event. The attack “starts” when funds move, and everything before that is operational noise.
On low fee, high throughput networks, the exploit is often the final step of a rehearsal cycle that already happened on mainnet.
Attackers can submit hundreds or thousands of small transactions to explore edge cases. They can repeatedly call the same function with slightly different inputs to observe revert reasons, response timing, and downstream state changes. They can test slippage bounds, price impact assumptions, and execution behavior under varying block conditions. They can watch how monitoring responds to bursts that stay below common thresholds.
This matters because the most useful signals frequently appear long before the exploit. They look like low impact activity, but they carry intent.
Why impact based monitoring arrives too late by design
Many monitoring programs are optimized for impact: large transfers, sudden balance changes, and known exploit signatures. Those controls can be effective when attacks are expensive to attempt and therefore relatively sparse.
They struggle when attacks are cheap to rehearse.
A single probing transaction is rarely meaningful. Even a dozen can look like normal experimentation or user error. What changes the interpretation is sequence: repetition, variation, and persistence across blocks.
Attackers lean into that ambiguity. They distribute attempts over time, vary calldata just enough to evade naive matching, and generate traffic that resembles curious usage rather than hostile intent. If detection evaluates transactions in isolation, it misses the story.
On low fee networks, the story is the attack.
What to watch for when the real signal is a pattern
When iteration is cheap, defenders should shift from single event thresholds to behavior over time. The indicators that tend to matter are not “big” transactions. They are repeated interactions that reveal an actor learning the system.
Common rehearsal patterns include:
Repeated calls that hit the same internal code path while inputs change, suggesting systematic parameter exploration rather than normal usage.
Clusters of reverts with related reasons that persist over time, especially when paired with minor calldata changes, which often indicates boundary testing.
Alternation between successful and reverted calls that reveals an actor mapping acceptance conditions, timing dependencies, or state prerequisites.
Ordering pressure that appears as tight submission timing, back to back transactions with small variations, or repeated attempts to influence sequencing, which can indicate latency measurement and execution control.
Low value transfers that matter primarily because of what they trigger, not what they move, especially when economic assumptions are being tested at negligible cost.
None of these signals are definitive in isolation. The point is that rehearsal produces a shape. Monitoring has to be able to see that shape.
Operational requirements for high throughput blockchains
If the environment enables cheap iteration, security operations need to be designed to notice iteration and act under uncertainty.
That starts with baselines. Organizations need to understand what normal usage looks like at the function and call path level, not only in aggregate. Sustained deviations from those baselines are often more informative than one off spikes.
It also raises the importance of response speed. When rehearsal is happening on mainnet, the window between the first credible probes and a successful exploit can be short. A detection that is technically correct but arrives hours later often fails operationally.
Finally, it demands clear authority and usable containment. Technical alerts do not reduce risk on their own. Someone must be empowered to interpret ambiguous signals, escalate them, and take action. Containment controls, including pausing where appropriate, must be operationally executable, with clear ownership and rehearsed procedures. If activation requires prolonged coordination or unclear decision rights, it will not happen in time.
Evidence cannot be an afterthought. When activity escalates, organizations will be asked to explain what happened and when. Decisions and actions should produce an audit ready record as a normal output of operations, not a reconstruction under pressure.
Where Managed Detection and Response fits
This is where managed detection and response becomes a practical control, not a marketing category.
Cantina's Managed Detection and Response is designed around the reality that on low fee, high throughput networks, attackers learn on mainnet. MDR helps organizations operationalize earlier detection and faster threat containment by connecting three elements that often remain disconnected:
First, sequence aware detection. MDR prioritizes behavioral patterns such as repeated call paths, revert fingerprints, parameter sweeps, and ordering pressure, then evaluates them in context over time rather than as isolated events.
Second, structured triage and escalation. Ambiguous signals require consistent handling. MDR pairs detection with clear ownership, escalation paths, and playbooks that define what “investigate,” “escalate,” and “contain” mean for the organization’s specific contracts and operational constraints.
Third, containment and evidence by default. When rehearsal patterns converge into credible risk, response needs to be decisive and governed. MDR supports operationally usable controls, including pause and administrative procedures where relevant, while capturing the timeline of alerts, decisions, and actions so the organization can explain outcomes to internal stakeholders and external counterparts.
Get in Touch
If your monitoring is optimized for impact rather than iteration, you are likely seeing the exploit while missing the rehearsal.
Cantina’s Managed Detection and Response can help you recalibrate around sequence level behavior, define what credible rehearsal looks like for your contracts, and implement escalation and containment workflows that hold up under pressure.
If you want to pressure test your current monitoring and response posture against this attack shape, schedule a call here.