Related papers: MEV Ecosystem Evolution From Ethereum 1.0
The rise of Ethereum has lead to a flourishing decentralized marketplace that has, unfortunately, fallen victim to frontrunning and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) activities, where savvy participants game transaction orderings within a…
We introduce the Clockwork Finance Framework (CFF), a general purpose, formal verification framework for mechanized reasoning about the economic security properties of composed decentralized-finance (DeFi) smart contracts. CFF features…
As cryptocurrency evolved, new financial instruments, such as lending and borrowing protocols, currency exchanges, fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFT), staking and mining protocols have emerged. A financial ecosystem built on top of a…
The Ethereum block-building process has changed significantly since the emergence of Proposer-Builder Separation. Validators access blocks through a marketplace, where block builders bid for the right to construct the block and earn MEV…
Lending protocols are one of the main applications of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), enabling crypto-assets loan markets with a total value estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Unlike traditional lending systems, these protocols…
Credit allows a lender to loan out surplus capital to a borrower. In the traditional economy, credit bears the risk that the borrower may default on its debt, the lender hence requires upfront collateral from the borrower, plus interest fee…
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…
We provide an economic model of Execution Tickets and use it to study the ability of the Ethereum protocol to capture MEV from block construction. We demonstrate that Execution Tickets extract all MEV when all buyers are homogeneous, risk…
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…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to excess value captured by miners (or validators) from users in a cryptocurrency network. This excess value often comes from reordering users' transactions to maximize fees or from inserting new…
In blockchain networks, the strategic ordering of transactions within blocks has emerged as a significant source of profit extraction, known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). The transition from spam-based Priority Gas Auctions to…
Lending protocols in decentralized finance enable the permissionless exchange of capital from lenders to borrowers without relying on a trusted third party for clearing or market-making. Interest rates are set by the supply and demand of…
Recently emerging Decentralized Finance (DeFi) takes the promise of cryptocurrencies a step further, leveraging their decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent protocols that run…
In the blockchain-based, distributed computing platform Ethereum, programs called smart contracts are compiled to bytecode and executed on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Executing EVM bytecode is subject to monetary fees---a clear…
Users of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications face significant risks from adversarial actions that manipulate the order of transactions to extract value from users. Such actions -- an adversarial form of what is called…
The detection of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in blockchain is crucial for enhancing blockchain security, as it enables the evaluation of potential consensus layer risks, the effectiveness of anti-centralization solutions, and the…
User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result,…
As an integral part of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) with automated market maker (AMM) protocols have gained massive traction with the recently revived interest in blockchain and distributed…
Traditional blockchain untraceability schemes, such as mixers and privacy coins, obscure the sender-receiver relationship by placing transfers within an anonymity set. This paper studies a stronger goal: whether the transfer event itself…
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are a class of smart contracts on Ethereum and other blockchains that "make markets" autonomously. In other words, AMMs stand ready to trade with other market participants that interact with them, at the…