Related papers: Towards a Formal Framework of the Ethereum Staking…
Staking has emerged as a crucial concept following Ethereum's transition to Proof-of-Stake consensus. The introduction of Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSDs) has effectively addressed the illiquidity issue associated with solo staking,…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
Block production on the Ethereum blockchain has adopted an auction-based mechanism known as Proposer--Builder Separation (PBS), where validators outsource block creation to builders competing in MEV--Boost auctions for Maximal Extractable…
We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical…
Participation in permissionless blockchains results in competition over system resources, which needs to be controlled with fees. Ethereum's current fee mechanism is implemented via a first-price auction that results in unpredictable fees…
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…
The MEV-Boost block auction contributes approximately 90% of all Ethereum blocks. Between October 2023 and March 2024, only three builders produced 80% of them, highlighting the concentration of power within the block builder market. To…
Blockchain's economic value lies in enabling financial and economic transactions without relying on trusted, centralized intermediaries. In practice, however, transactions pass through a fragmented chain of intermediaries before being…
Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain systems that supports more than half a million transactions every day and fosters miscellaneous decentralized applications with its Turing-complete smart contract machine. Whereas it remains…
Ethereum, as a representative of Web3, adopts a novel framework called Proposer Builder Separation (PBS) to prevent the centralization of block profits in the hands of institutional Ethereum stakers. Introducing builders to generate blocks…
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size.…
The goal of this paper is to rigorously interrogate conventional wisdom about centralization in block-building (due to, e.g., MEV and private order flow) and the outsourcing of block-building by validators to specialists (i.e.,…
Layer-2 (L2) blockchains inherit Ethereums security guarantees while reducing gas fees. As a result, they are gaining traction among traders at Automated Market Makers (AMMs), sparking debate over whether they contribute to liquidity…
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,…
We use historical data to estimate the potential benefit of speculative techniques for executing Ethereum smart contracts in parallel. We replay transaction traces of sampled blocks from the Ethereum blockchain over time, using a simple…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
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,…
We formulate and solve stochastic control problems that model the core yield-generating strategy of the Ethena protocol, a decentralized finance (DeFi) stablecoin that earns yield by combining a long position in staked Ethereum (stETH) with…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
We study a new "laminated" queueing model for orders on batched trading venues such as decentralised exchanges. The model aims to capture and generalise transaction queueing infrastructure that has arisen to organise MEV activity on public…