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The blockchain technology promises to transform finance, money and even governments. However, analyses of blockchain applicability and robustness typically focus on isolated systems whose actors contribute mainly by running the consensus…
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a way to collect digital art as well as an investment vehicle. Despite having been popularized only recently, NFT markets have witnessed several high-profile (and high-value) asset sales and a…
The number of attacks and accidents leading to significant losses of crypto-assets is growing. According to Chainalysis, in 2021, approx. $14 billion has been lost due to various incidents, and this number is dominated by Decentralized…
We quantitatively describe the main events that led to the Terra project's failure in May 2022. We first review, in a systematic way, news from heterogeneous social media sources; we discuss the fragility of the Terra project and its…
As of August 2022, blockchain-based assets boast a combined market capitalisation exceeding one trillion USD, among which the most prominent are the decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) tokens associated with decentralised finance…
In recent years, a more advanced form of phishing has arisen on Ethereum, surpassing early-stage, simple transaction phishing. This new form, which we refer to as payload-based transaction phishing (PTXPHISH), manipulates smart contract…
Cryptocurrency trading has attracted tremendous attention from both retail and institutional investors. However, most traders fail to scale their assets under management due to fragile strategies that collapse during adverse markets. The…
DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is based on a distributed ledger called blockchain technology. Using blockchain, DeFi may customize the execution of predetermined operations between parties. The DeFi system use blockchain technology to…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) offers a whole new investment experience and has quickly emerged as an enticing alternative to Centralized Finance (CeFi). Rapidly growing market size and active users, however, have also made DeFi a lucrative…
Ponzi schemes are financial frauds which lure users under the promise of high profits. Actually, users are repaid only with the investments of new users joining the scheme: consequently, a Ponzi scheme implodes soon after users stop joining…
In this study the cross-correlations between the cryptocurrency market represented by the two most liquid and highest-capitalized cryptocurrencies: bitcoin and ethereum, on the one side, and the instruments representing the traditional…
Many classical blockchains are known to have an embarrassingly low transaction throughput, down to Bitcoin's notorious seven transactions per second limit.Various proposals and implementations for increasing throughput emerged in the first…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a blockchain powered peer-to-peer financial system, is mushrooming. Two years ago the total value locked in DeFi systems was approximately 700m USD, now, as of April 2022, it stands at around 150bn USD. The…
Cryptocurrency is a fast-moving space, with a continuous influx of new projects every year. However, an increasing number of incidents in the space, such as hacks and security breaches, threaten the growth of the community and the…
We study recurrent patterns in volatility and volume for major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ether, using data from two centralized exchanges (Coinbase Pro and Binance) and a decentralized exchange (Uniswap V2). We find systematic patterns…
This paper contextualises the common queries of "why is crypto crashing?" and "why is crypto down?", the research transcends beyond the frequent market fluctuations to unravel how cryptocurrencies fundamentally work and the step-by-step…
This paper presents a comprehensive statistical analysis of the Web3 ecosystem, comparing various Web3 tokens with traditional financial assets across multiple time scales. We examine probability distributions, tail behaviors, and other key…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding \$77 billion. However, detection methods for malicious…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) enables many novel applications that were impossible in traditional finances. However, it also introduces new types of vulnerabilities. An example of such vulnerabilities is a composability bug between token…
We analyze the market quality of centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized blockchain-based venues (DEXs) using a unique and comprehensive dataset. Focusing on two fundamental aspects, transaction costs and deviations from the…