Related papers: Toxic Liquidation Spirals
Global illicit fund flows exceed an estimated $3.1 trillion annually, with stablecoins emerging as a preferred laundering medium due to their liquidity. While decentralized protocols increasingly adopt zero-knowledge proofs to obfuscate…
Sharding is a way to address scalability problem in blockchain technologies. Ethereum, a prominent blockchain technology, has included sharding in its roadmap to increase its throughput. The plan is also to include multiple execution…
We introduce the Aggregated Systemic Risk Index (ASRI), comprising four weighted sub-indices: Stablecoin Concentration Risk (30%), DeFi Liquidity Risk (25%), Contagion Risk (25%), and Regulatory Opacity Risk (20%). Using data from DeFi…
The adoption of blockchain for Transactive Energy has gained significant momentum as it allows mutually non-trusting agents to trade energy services in a trustless energy market. Research to date has assumed that the built-in Byzantine…
Decentralized communication is becoming an important use case within Web3. On Ethereum, users can repurpose the transaction input data field to embed natural-language messages, commonly known as Input Data Messages (IDMs). However, as IDMs…
We consider an illiquid financial market where a risk averse investor has to liquidate a portfolio within a finite time horizon [0,T] and can trade continuously at a traditional exchange (the "primary venue") and in a dark pool. At the…
Since the Merge update upon which Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake, it has been touted that it resulted in lower power consumption and increased security. However, even if that is the case, can this state be sustained? In this paper,…
Fraud across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is growing, with victims losing billions to DeFi scams every year. However, there is a disconnect between the reported value of these scams and associated legal prosecutions. We use…
Blockchain solutions typically assume a synchronous network to ensure consistency and achieve consensus. In contrast, offline transaction systems aim to enable users to agree on and execute transactions without assuming bounded…
We extend the Annually Recalculated Virtual Annuity (ARVA) spending rule for retirement savings decumulation to include a cap and a floor on withdrawals. With a minimum withdrawal constraint, the ARVA strategy runs the risk of depleting the…
We study how the 2024 U.S. presidential election, viewed as a major political risk event, affected cryptocurrency markets by distinguishing human-driven peer-to-peer stablecoin transactions from automated algorithmic activity. Using…
Cryptocurrency lending pools are services that allow lenders to pool together assets in one cryptocurrency and loan it out to borrowers who provide collateral worth more (than the loan) in a separate cryptocurrency. Borrowers can repay…
As the number of decentralized applications and users on Ethereum grows, the ability of the blockchain to efficiently handle a growing number of transactions becomes increasingly strained. Ethereums current execution model relies heavily on…
Liquidity providers (LPs) on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) can protect themselves from adverse selection risk by updating their positions more frequently. However, repositioning is costly, because LPs have to pay gas fees for each update.…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
We build a simple model of leveraged asset purchases with margin calls. Investment funds use what is perhaps the most basic financial strategy, called "value investing", i.e. systematically attempting to buy underpriced assets. When funds…
We study the problem of optimally hedging the price exposure of liquidity positions in constant-product automated market makers (AMMs) when the hedge is funded by collateralized borrowing. A liquidity provider (LP) who borrows tokens to…
MEV attacks have been an omnipresent evil in the blockchain world, an implicit tax that uninformed users pay for using the service. The problem arises from the miners' ability to reorder and insert arbitrary transactions in the blocks they…
The evolution of blockchain technology, from its origins as a decentralized ledger for cryptocurrencies to its broader applications in areas like decentralized finance (DeFi), has significantly transformed financial ecosystems while…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Ethereum has undergone significant transformations since its emergence during the DeFi summer of 2020. With the introduction of Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), the transaction…