Crypto gives researchers something traditional markets never could: fully transparent, public market data — every trade, every liquidity position, every liquidation, on-chain and downloadable. The result is a research field where microstructure questions that took decades to answer for equities get answered in months, alongside genuinely new objects of study: automated market makers, MEV, stablecoin mechanisms, and perpetual futures funding.
Quality varies more here than in any other hub. The strongest work treats crypto as a natural laboratory — testing arbitrage, momentum, and market-making theory against complete data. The weakest imports an equity-market technique, runs it on three years of BTC prices, and declares alpha. Check the sample period against regime shifts (pre/post 2021 institutional entry, exchange collapses) before trusting any backtest, and note that many exploitable inefficiencies documented in 2018-era papers have long since been arbitraged away.
Related hubs: Market Microstructure, Statistical Arbitrage, NLP & LLMs in Finance.
Designing automated market makers (AMMs) is crucial for decentralized token exchanges in cryptoeconomic systems. At the intersection of software engineering and economics, AMM design is complex and, if done incorrectly, can lead to financial risks and inefficiencies. We developed an AMM taxonomy for
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 blockchain is supposed to be fair and transparent for each par
This whitepaper introduces an innovative mechanism for pricing perpetual contracts and quoting fees to traders based on current market conditions. The approach employs liquidity curves and on-chain oracles to establish a new adaptive pricing framework that considers various factors, ensuring pricing
Price feeds of securities is a critical component for many financial services, allowing for collateral liquidation, margin trading, derivative pricing and more. With the advent of blockchain technology, value in reporting accurate prices without a third party has become apparent. There have been man
This paper introduces a heterogeneous macroeconomic model of a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network to analyze the long-term centralizing effects of external traditional finance (TradFi) yields. We model a continuum of rational actors divided into two distinct classes: investors, who optimize portfolios bet
In cryptocurrency markets, a key challenge for perpetual future issuers is maintaining alignment between the perpetual future price and target value. This study addresses this challenge by exploring the relationship between funding rates and perpetual future prices. Our results demonstrate that by a
We introduce the first formal model capturing the elicitation of unverifiable information from a party (the “source”) with implicit signals derived by other players (the “observers”). Our model is motivated in part by applications in decentralized physical infrastructure networks (a.k.a. “DePIN”), a
Automated market makers are a popular mechanism used on decentralized exchange, through which users trade assets with each other directly and automatically through a liquidity pool and a fixed pricing function. The liquidity provider contributes to the liquidity pool by supplying assets to the pool,
In this study, we investigate the BTC price time-series (17 August 2010-27 June 2021) and show that the 2017 pricing episode is not unique. We describe at least ten new events, which occurred since 2010-2011 and span more than five orders of price magnitudes ($US 1-$US 60k). We find that those event
We consider Geometric Mean Market Makers – a special type of Decentralized Exchange – with two types of users: liquidity takers and arbitrageurs. Liquidity takers trade at prices that can create arbitrage opportunities, while arbitrageurs align the exchange’s price with the external market price.
In traditional finance, the Black & Scholes model has guided almost 50 years of derivatives pricing, defining a standard to model any volatility-based product. With the rise of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and constant product Automated Market Makers (AMMs), Liquidity Providers (LPs) are playing an
Renewed public attention on the identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator has sharpened focus on the Satoshi overhang, commonly framed as a tail risk for bitcoin. This paper argues that the mechanical downside of a disposition is bounded well below the existential-loss framing, and that the termina
We introduce a new class of automated market maker (AMM), the \emph{partially active automated market maker} (PA-AMM). PA-AMM divides its reserves into two parts, the active and the passive parts, and uses only the active part for trading. At the top of every block, such a division is done again to
This paper explores how entrepreneurs can use initial coin offerings — whereby they issue crypto tokens and commit to only accept those tokens as payment for th
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has revolutionized financial markets by enabling complex asset-exchange protocols without trusted intermediaries. Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are a central component of DeFi, providing the core functionality of swapping assets of different types at algorithmically com
The launch of $Trump coin ignited a wave in meme coin investment. Copy trading, as a strategy-agnostic approach that eliminates the need for deep trading knowledge, quickly gains widespread popularity in the meme coin market. However, copy trading is not a guarantee of profitability due to the preva
As restaking protocols gain adoption across blockchain ecosystems, there is a need for Actively Validated Services (AVSs) to span multiple Shared Security Providers (SSPs). This leads to stake fragmentation which introduces new complications where an adversary may compromise an AVS by targeting its
This work analytically characterizes impermanent loss for automated market makers (AMMs) in decentralized markets such as Uniswap or Balancer (CPMM). We derive a static replication formula for the pool’s value using a combination of European calls and puts. Furthermore, we establish a result guarant
This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing Concentrated Liquidity Market Makers (CLMMs) in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) within a continuous-time setting. We model the evolution of liquidity profiles as measure-valued processes and characterize their dynamics under continuous
An automated market maker where the price can cross the zero bound into the negative price domain with applications in electricity, energy, and derivatives markets is presented. A unique feature involves the ability to swap both negatively and positively priced assets between one another, which unli