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The rise of Ethereum and other blockchains that support smart contracts has led to the creation of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), such as Uniswap, Balancer, Curve, mStable, and SushiSwap, which enable agents to trade cryptocurrencies…
Decentralized exchanges, such as those employing constant product market makers (CPMMs) like Uniswap V2, play a crucial role in the blockchain ecosystem by enabling peer-to-peer token swaps without intermediaries. Despite the increasing…
We present an example where a distributed coordinated protocol supported by a blockchain-enabled monetary mechanism leads to achieving optimal information theoretic degrees of freedom gains. The considered setting is that of a linear…
Centralized stablecoins such as USDT and USDC enforce sanctions through contract-layer blacklist functions. Yet on public blockchains, a freeze is still an ordinary transaction competing with the sanctioned party's transfer for priority. It…
We describe a plausible probabilistic model for a blockchain queueing environment in which rational, profit-maximising schedulers impose adversarial disciplines on incoming messages containing a payload that encodes a state transition in a…
Autonomous Market Makers (AMMs) rely on arbitrage to facilitate passive price updates. Liquidity fragmentation poses a complex challenge across different blockchain networks. This paper proposes FluxLayer, a solution to mitigate fragmented…
Randomness beacons based on Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) are increasingly proposed for blockchains and distributed systems, promising publicly verifiable delay and bias resistance. Existing analyses, however, treat adversaries purely…
Liquidation of collateral are the primary safeguard for solvency of lending protocols in decentralized finance. However, the mechanics of liquidations expose these protocols to predatory price manipulations and other forms of Maximal…
DEX, or decentralized exchange, is a prominent class of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on blockchains, attracting a total locked value worth tens of billions of USD today. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
In large-scale distributed environments, avoiding concurrent access to the same resource by multiple processes becomes a core challenge, commonly termed distributed mutual exclusion (DME). Token-based mechanisms have long been recognized as…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Can a welfare-maximising risk-sharing rule be implemented in a large, decentralised community? We revisit the price-and-choose (P&C) mechanism of Echenique and N\'u\~nez (2025), in which players post price schedules sequentially and the…
In this paper, we analyze traders' behavior within both centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), focusing on the volatility of Bitcoin prices and the trading activity of investors engaged in perpetual future…
The goal of cryptocurrencies is decentralization. In principle, all currencies have equal status. Unlike traditional stock markets, there is no default currency of denomination (fiat), thus the trading pairs can be set freely. However, it…
Layer 2 rollups are rapidly absorbing DeFi activity, securing over $40 billion and accounting for nearly half of Ethereum's DEX volume by Q1 2025, yet their MEV dynamics remain understudied. We address this gap by defining and quantifying…
This study analyzes proposer-builder data and MEV-Boost payment data following the Ethereum merge in September 2022 to identify patterns of multi-block MEV. Our findings reveal fewer multi-slot sequences of builders than predicted by a…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
We argue that the machine learning value chain is structurally unsustainable due to an economic data processing inequality: each state in the data cycle from inputs to model weights to synthetic outputs refines technical signal but strips…