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.
Concentrated liquidity (CL) provisioning is a way how to improve the capital efficiency of Automated Market Makers (AMM). Allowing liquidity providers to use leverage is a step towards even higher capital efficiency. A number of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols implement this technique in conj
The year 2024 witnessed a major development in the cryptocurrency industry with the long-awaited approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This innovation provides investors with a new, regulated path to gain exposure to Bitcoin through a familiar investment vehicle (Kumar et al., 2024)
We have developed a novel risk management measure called the concentration risk indicator (CRI). The CRI has been created to address drawbacks with prevailing methodologies and to supplement existing methods. Modified and adapted from the Herfindahl-Hirschman (HH) index, the CRI can give a single nu
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has reshaped the possibilities of reserve banking in the form of the Collateralized Debt Position (CDP). Key to the safety of CDPs is the money supply architecture that enables issued debt to maintain its value. In traditional markets, and with respect to the United Stat
Milionis et al.(2023) studied the rate at which automated market makers leak value to arbitrageurs when block times are discrete and follow a Poisson process, and where the risky asset price follows a geometric Brownian motion. We extend their model to analyze another popular mechanism in decentrali
Triangle fees are a novel fee structure for AMMs, in which marginal fees are decreasing in a trade’s size. That decline is proportional to the movement in the AMM’s implied price, i.e. for every basis point the trade moves the ratio of assets, the marginal fee declines by a basis point. These fees c
We develop a formalism for reasoning about trading on decentralized exchanges on blockchains and a formulation of a particular form of maximal extractable value (MEV) that represents the total arbitrage opportunity extractable from on-chain liquidity. We use this formalism to prove that for blockcha
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 conditions determined by the AMM. In this this paper, which relie
The global financial architecture is undergoing a shift from intermediary centric-settlement to programmable infrastructure, to transmute trillions in static illiquid capital into active, high-velocity instruments. We argue that Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization represents a conceptual evolution b
We study the optimal routing problem in decentralized exchanges built on Constant Function Market Makers when trades can be split across multiple heterogeneous pools and execution incurs fixed on-chain costs (gas fees). While prior routing formulations typically abstract from fixed activation costs,
Modern financial networks involve complex obligations that transcend simple monetary debts: multiple currencies, prioritized claims, supply chain dependencies, and more. We present a mathematical framework that unifies and extends these scenarios by recasting the classical Eisenberg-Noe model of fin
Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a financial ecosystem without centralized controlling organization, has introduced a new paradigm for lending and borrowing. However, its capital efficiency remains constrained by the inability to effectively assess the risk associated with each user/wallet. This paper
The role of a market maker is to simultaneously offer to buy and sell quantities of goods, often a financial asset such as a share, at specified prices. An automated market maker (AMM) is a mechanism that offers to trade according to some predetermined schedule; the best choice of this schedule depe
Cryptocurrencies are a type of digital money meant to provide security and anonymity while using cryptography techniques. Although cryptocurrencies represent a breakthrough and provide some important benefits, their usage poses some risks that are a result of the lack of supervising institutions and
In this paper, we explore the aftermath of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse, with a particular focus on its impact on crypto markets. We conduct a multi-dimensional investigation, which includes a factual summary, analysis of user sentiment, and examination of market performance. Based on such
Constant function market makers (CFMMs) are the most popular type of decentralized trading venue for cryptocurrency tokens. In this paper, we give a very general geometric framework (or ‘axioms’) which encompass and generalize many of the known results for CFMMs in the literature, without requiring
This paper explores how entrepreneurs can use fungible tokens—whereby they issue digital assets and commit to only accept those tokens as payment for future pro
In this work, we propose to apply a new model fusion and learning paradigm, known as Combinatorial Fusion Analysis (CFA), to the field of Bitcoin price prediction. Price prediction of financial product has always been a big topic in finance, as the successful prediction of the price can yield signif
The programmable and composable nature of smart contract protocols has enabled the emergence of novel market structures and asset classes that are architecturally frictional to implement in traditional financial paradigms. This fluidity has produced an understudied class of market dynamics, particul
Price benchmarks are used to incorporate market price trends into contracts, but their use can create opportunities for manipulation by parties involved in the contract. This paper examines this issue using a realistic and tractable model inspired by smart contracts on blockchains like Ethereum. In