Related papers: Liquidations: DeFi on a Knife-edge
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has reshaped the possibilities of reserve banking in the form of the Collateralized Debt Position (CDP). Key to the safety of CDPs is the money supply architecture that enables issued debt to maintain its value.…
In decentralized non-custodial micropayments, the central challenge is not whether payments can be executed directly, but under what conditions such systems can offer credit limits without requiring full collateral backing. Existing…
Ethereum's scalability limitations pose significant challenges for the adoption of decentralized applications (dApps). Zero-Knowledge Rollups (ZK Rollups) present a promising solution, bundling transactions off-chain and submitting validity…
Permissioned blockchain systems promise to provide both decentralized trust and privacy. Hyperledger Fabric is currently one of the most wide-spread permissioned blockchain systems and is heavily promoted both in industry and academia. Due…
In the context of decentralized blockchains, accurately simulating the outcome of order flow auctions (OFAs) off-chain is challenging due to adversarial sequencing, encrypted bids, and frequent state changes. Existing approaches, such as…
The advent of decentralized trading markets introduces a number of new challenges for consensus protocols. In addition to the `usual' attacks -- a subset of the validators trying to prevent disagreement -- there is now the possibility of…
While blockchains initially gained popularity in the realm of cryptocurrencies, their widespread adoption is expanding beyond conventional applications, driven by the imperative need for enhanced data security. Despite providing a secure…
Federated learning has been rapidly evolving and gaining popularity in recent years due to its privacy-preserving features, among other advantages. Nevertheless, the exchange of model updates and gradients in this architecture provides new…
The rising importance of cryptocurrencies as financial assets pushed their applicability from an object of speculation closer to standard financial instruments such as loans. In this work, we initiate the study of secure protocols that…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a nascent set of financial services, using tokens, smart contracts, and blockchain technology as financial instruments. We investigate four possible drivers of DeFi returns: exposure to cryptocurrency market,…
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…
Learning to defer (L2D) aims to improve human-AI collaboration systems by learning how to defer decisions to humans when they are more likely to be correct than an ML classifier. Existing research in L2D overlooks key real-world aspects…
Decentralized applications (dApps) in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) face a fundamental tension between regulatory compliance requirements like Know Your Customer (KYC) and maintaining decentralization and privacy. Existing permissioned DeFi…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has revolutionized the financial landscape, with protocols like Uniswap offering innovative automated market-making mechanisms. This article explores the development of a backtesting framework specifically…
We study the problem of asset liquidation in financial systems. During financial crises, asset liquidation is often inevitable but can lead to substantial losses if a significant amount of illiquid assets are sold simultaneously at…
The rapid growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) boosts the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, attacks towards DeFi applications (apps) are increasing. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing smart contract vulnerability…
Blockchain promises to enhance distributed machine learning (ML) approaches such as federated learning (FL) by providing further decentralization, security, immutability, and trust, which are key properties for enabling collaborative…
This paper presents Wrapless -- a lending protocol that enables the collateralization of bitcoins without requiring a trusted wrapping mechanism. The protocol facilitates a "loan channel" on the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing bitcoins to be…
Federated learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning solution that only exchanges model parameters without revealing raw data. However, the centralized architecture of FL is vulnerable to the single point of failure. In addition, FL…