Hongzhe Wen, Songbai Li, Ronald Siu Man Lau, Jamie Zhang
With market capitalization exceeding USD250 billion by mid-2025, stablecoins have evolved from a crypto-focused innovation into a vital component of the global monetary structure. This paper identifies the characteristics of stablecoins from an analytical perspective and investigates the role of stablecoins in forming a hybrid monetary ecosystem where public (fiat, CBDC) and private (USDC, USDT, DAI) monies coexist. Through a number of econometric analysis models, we find that stablecoins maintain strong peg stability, while each type exhibiting distinctive responses to market variables such as trading volume and capitalization depending on the mechanisms behind. We also introduce a hybrid system design that proposes a two-layer structure, which private stablecoin issuers are backed by central bank reserves, ensuring uniformity, security, and programmability. This model takes advantages of both decentralized finance and payment innovation, while utilizing the Federal Reserve's institutional trust. A case study on the SVB-USDC de-peg event in 2023 illustrates how such a hybrid system could have prevented panic-induced instability through transparent reserves, secured liquidity, and interoperable assets. Through examination of the Dybvig model and simulation, we conclude that a hybrid monetary model not only enhances financial inclusivity, scalability, and dollar utility in digital ecosystems, but it also strengthens systemic resilience, offering a credible blueprint for future digital dollar architectures.
Michael D. Norman, Simon Brown, Mallesh M. Pai, Laurence Smith
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. This affords the highest effective yields to smaller operators, fueling network growth and giving users an incentive to delegate their stake to smaller operators. This prevents the preferential accrual and centralization of stake seen in popular blockchains such as Ethereum, where popular liquid staking protocols control large fractions of the total stake thereby having outsized potential impacts on the economic security of the protocol. The proposed system addresses key challenges such as Sybil attacks and offers a comprehensive framework for future research and implementation. We introduce innovative mechanisms and gamification elements, to enhance user engagement and provide transparency in emissions.
We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is a strong governance method from an epistemic standpoint compared to alternatives such as various forms of ``transfer delegation" in which voters explicitly transfer some or all of their voting rights to others. We make a stronger case for multi-step transfer delegation than is present in previous work but also demonstrate that transfer delegation has inherent epistemic weaknesses. We show that enhanced direct participation, voters exercising their own voting rights, can have a variety of epistemic impacts, some very negative. We identify governance conditions under which additional direct participation is guaranteed to do no epistemic harm and is likely to increase the probability of making correct decisions. In light of the epistemic challenges of voting-based decentralized governance, we consider the possible supplementary use of prediction markets, auctions, and AI agents to improve outcomes. All these results are significant because epistemic performance matters if entities such as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) wish to compete with organizations that are more centralized.
Blockchains have block-size limits to ensure the entire cluster can keep up with the tip of the chain. These block-size limits are usually single-dimensional, but richer multidimensional constraints allow for greater throughput. The potential for performance improvements from multidimensional resource pricing has been discussed in the literature, but exactly how big those performance improvements are remains unclear. In order to identify the magnitude of additional throughput that multi-dimensional transaction fees can unlock, we introduce the concept of an $α$-approximation. A constraint set $C_1$ is $α$-approximated by $C_2$ if every block feasible under $C_1$ is also feasible under $C_2$ once all resource capacities are scaled by a factor of $α$ (e.g., $α=2$ corresponds to doubling all available resources). We show that the $α$-approximation of the optimal single-dimensional gas measure corresponds to the value of a specific zero-sum game. However, the more general problem of finding the optimal $k$-dimensional approximation is NP-complete. Quantifying the additional throughput that multi-dimensional fees can provide allows blockchain designers to make informed decisions about whether the additional capacity unlocked by multidimensional constraints is worth the additional complexity they add to the protocol.
In financial applications, latency advantages -- the ability to make decisions later than others, even without the ability to see what others have done -- can provide individual participants with an edge by allowing them to gather additional relevant information. For example, a trader who is able to act even milliseconds after another trader may receive information about changing prices on other exchanges that lets them make a profit at the expense of the latter. To better understand the economics of latency advantages, we consider a common-value auction with a reserve price in which some bidders may have more information about the value of the item than others, e.g., by bidding later. We provide a characterization of the equilibrium strategies, and study the welfare and auctioneer revenue implications of the last-mover advantage. We show that the auction does not degenerate completely and that the seller is still able to capture some value. We study comparative statics of the equilibrium under different assumptions about the nature of the latency advantage. Under the assumptions of the Black-Scholes model, we derive formulas for the last mover's expected profit, as well as for the sensitivity of that profit to their timing advantage. We apply our results to the design of blockchain protocols that aim to run auctions for financial assets on-chain, where incentives to increase timing advantages can put pressure on the decentralization of the system.
We show that a replicated state machine (such as a blockchain protocol) can retain liveness in a strategic setting even while facing substantial ambiguity over certain events. This is implemented by a complementary protocol called "Machine II", which generates a non-ergodic value within chosen intervals such that no limiting frequency can be observed. We show how to implement this machine algorithmically and how it might be applied strategically as a mechanism for "veiling" actions. We demonstrate that welfare-enhancing applications for veiling exist for users belonging to a wide class of ambiguity attitudes, e.g. Binmore (2016), Gul and Pesendorfer (2014). Our approach is illustrated with applications to forking disputes in blockchain oracles and to Constant Function Market Makers, allowing the protocol to retain liveness without exposing their users to sure-loss.
In the context of decentralized blockchains, accurately simulating the outcome of order flow auctions (OFAs) off-chain is challenging due to adversarial sequencing, encrypted bids, and frequent state changes. Existing approaches, such as deterministic sorting via consensus layer modifications (e.g., MEV taxes) (Robinson and White 2024) and BRAID (Resnick 2024) or atomic execution of aggregated bids (e.g., Atlas) (Watts et al. 2024), remain vulnerable in permissionless settings where limited throughput allows rational adversaries to submit "spoof" bids that block their competitors' access to execution. We propose a new failure cost penalty that applies only when a solution is executed but does not pay its bid or fulfill the order. Combined with an on-chain escrow system, this mechanism empowers applications to asynchronously issue their users a guaranteed minimum outcome before the execution results are finalized. It implies a direct link between blockchain throughput, censorship resistance, and the capital efficiency of auction participants (e.g., solvers), which intuitively extends to execution quality. At equilibrium, bids fully reflect the potential for price improvement between bid submission and execution, but only partially reflect the potential for price declines. This asymmetry unbounded upside for winning bids, limited downside for failed bids, and no loss for losing bids - ultimately benefits users.
This paper demonstrates that Automated Market Maker (AMM) based markets, such as those using constant product formulas (e.g., Uniswap), are inherently path-dependent. We prove mathematically that the sequence of operations in AMMs determines the final state, challenging the notion that market prices solely reflect information. This property has profound implications for decentralized prediction markets that rely on AMMs for price discovery, as it demonstrates they cannot function as pure "truth machines." Using both mathematical proofs and empirical evidence from ETH/USDC pools, we show that AMM-based markets incorporate historical path information beyond the current market beliefs. Our findings contribute to the understanding of market efficiency, mechanism design, and the interpretation of prices in decentralized finance systems.
Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, coined the term 'chaordic' to describe simultaneously chaotic and ordered systems. Based on his reasoning, we introduce the Theory of Chaordic Economics to explain how economic systems are transformed by two disruptive technologies: namely Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. Artificial intelligence can generate novel output through algorithmic yet rather unpredictable processes. Blockchain creates deterministic results without central authorities and relies on elaborated protocols that prescribe how consensus can be reached within a network of peers. The amalgamation of chaos and order produces chaordic economic systems and can yield hitherto unthinkable economic structures.
We develop a dynamic model of the Bitcoin market where users set fees themselves and miners decide whether to operate and whom to validate based on those fees. Our analysis reveals how, in equilibrium, users adjust their bids in response to short-term congestion (i.e., the amount of pending transactions), how miners decide when to start operating based on the level of congestion, and how the interplay between these two factors shapes the overall market dynamics. The miners hold off operating when the congestion is mild, which harms social welfare. However, we show that a block reward (a fixed reward paid to miners upon a block production) can mitigate these inefficiencies. We characterize the socially optimal block reward and demonstrate that it is always positive, suggesting that Bitcoin's halving schedule may be suboptimal.
We study the impact of the order flow auction (OFA) in the context of the proposer-builder separation (PBS) mechanism in blockchains through a game-theoretic perspective. The OFA is designed to improve user welfare by redistributing maximal extractable value (MEV) to the users, in which two sequential auctions take place: the order flow auction and the block-building auction. We formulate the OFA as a multiplayer game, and establish the existence of a Nash equilibrium, and in the two-player case derive a closed-form solution (and prove its uniqueness) via a quartic equation. Our result shows that the builder with a competitive advantage pays a lower cost, leading to a higher revenue, and adding to centralization in the builder space. In contrast, the proposer's shares evolve as a martingale process, which implies decentralization in the proposer/validator space. Our analyses rely on various tools from stochastic processes, convex optimization, and polynomial equations. We also conduct numerical studies to corroborate our findings, and to bring out other features of the OFA under the PBS mechanism.
Today, many auctions are carried out with the help of intermediary platforms like Google and eBay. We refer to such auctions as platform-assisted auctions.Traditionally, the auction theory literature mainly focuses on designing auctions that incentivize the buyers to bid truthfully,assuming that the platform always faithfully implements the auction. In practice, however, the platforms have been found to manipulate the auctions to earn more profit, resulting in high-profile anti-trust lawsuits. We propose a new model for studying platform-assisted auctions in the permissionless setting. We explore whether it is possible to design a dream auction in thisnew model, such that honest behavior is the utility-maximizing strategy for each individual buyer, the platform, the seller, as well as platform-seller or platform-buyer coalitions.Through a collection of feasibility and infeasibility results,we carefully characterize the mathematical landscape of platform-assisted auctions. We show how cryptography can lend to the design of an efficient platform-assisted auction with dream properties. Although a line of works have also used MPC or the blockchain to remove the reliance on a trusted auctioneer, our work is distinct in nature in several dimensions.First, we initiate a systematic exploration of the game theoretic implications when the service providers are strategic and can collude with sellers or buyers. Second, we observe that the full simulation paradigm is too stringent and leads to high asymptotical costs. Specifically, because every player has a different private outcomein an auction protocol, running any generic MPC protocol among the players would incur at least $n^2$ total cost. We propose a new notion of simulation calledutility-dominated emulation.Under this new notion, we showhow to design efficient auction protocols with quasilinear efficiency.
We compare the total capital efficiency of secure restaking and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols. First, we consider the sufficient condition for the restaking graph to be secure. The condition implies that it is always possible to transform such a restaking graph into separate secure PoS protocols. Next, we derive two main results: upper and lower bounds on the required extra stakes to add to the validators of the secure restaking graph to be able to transform it into secure PoS protocols. In particular, we show that the restaking savings compared to PoS protocols can be very large and can asymptotically grow as a square root of the number of validators. We also study a complementary question of aggregating secure PoS protocols into a secure restaking graph and provide matching lower and upper bounds on the PoS savings.
Can wasteful money burning improve strategic communication? We show that it can, but only with intermediate commitment. In mediated communication with report-contingent burning, the mediator can use costly messages to discipline deviations and make persuasive messages credible. Under transparent motives, increasing the burning budget strictly raises the Sender's payoff once the budget is large enough, unless mediated communication with money burning collapses to cheap talk. With an unbounded budget, the value equals a robust Bayesian persuasion payoff, or equivalently the payoff of a cautious Sender. The framework clarifies commitment through smart contracts and Web 3.0 mediation.
This paper introduces the Voting with Random Proposers (VRP) procedure to address the challenges of agenda manipulation in voting. In each round of VRP, a randomly selected proposer suggests an alternative that is voted on against the previous round's winner. In a framework with single-peaked preferences, we show that the VRP procedure guarantees that the Condorcet winner is implemented in a few rounds with truthful voting, and in just two rounds under sufficiently symmetric preference distributions or if status quo positions are not extreme. The results have applications for committee decisions, legislative decision-making, and the organization of citizens' assemblies and decentralized autonomous organizations.
Aadityan Ganesh, Clayton Thomas, S. Matthew Weinberg
Transaction Fee Mechanism Design studies auctions run by untrusted miners for transaction inclusion in a blockchain. Under previously-considered desiderata, an auction is considered `good' if, informally-speaking, each party (i.e., the miner, the users, and coalitions of both miners and users) has no incentive to deviate from the fixed and pre-determined protocol. In this paper, we propose a novel desideratum for transaction fee mechanisms. We say that a TFM is off-chain influence proof when the miner cannot achieve additional revenue by running a separate auction off-chain. While the previously-highlighted EIP-1559 is the gold-standard according to prior desiderata, we show that it does not satisfy off-chain influence proofness. Intuitively, this holds because a Bayesian revenue-maximizing miner can strictly increase profits by persuasively threatening to censor any bids that do not transfer a tip directly to the miner off-chain. On the other hand, we reconsider the Cryptographic (multi-party computation assisted) Second Price Auction mechanism, which is technically not `simple for miners' according to previous desiderata (since miners may wish to set a reserve by fabricating bids). We show that, in a slightly different model where the miner is allowed to set the reserve directly, this auction satisfies simplicity for users and miners, and off-chain influence proofness. Finally, we prove a strong impossibility result: no mechanism satisfies all previously-considered properties along with off-chain influence proofness, even with unlimited supply, and even after soliciting input from the miner.
Bitcoin demonstrated the possibility of a financial ledger that operates without the need for a trusted central authority. However, concerns persist regarding its security and considerable energy consumption. We assess the consensus protocols that underpin Bitcoin's functionality, questioning whether they can ensure economically meaningful security while maintaining a permissionless design that allows free entry of operators. We answer this affirmatively by constructing a protocol that guarantees economic security and preserves Bitcoin's permissionless design. This protocol's security does not depend on monetary payments to miners or immense electricity consumption, which our analysis suggests are ineffective. Our framework integrates economic theory with distributed systems theory, and formalizes the role of the protocol's user community.
Trade-intent auctions intermediate around USD~9~billion in monthly trading volume. In these auctions, specialized intermediaries called solvers compete for the right to execute orders across fragmented blockchain-based financial markets. These auctions are combinatorial because executing multiple trade intents jointly generates additional efficiencies. However, there is no best-execution benchmark to determine how to share those efficiencies: the best possible execution of a trade is solvers' private information and must be elicited. We study theoretically the two main mechanisms: batch auctions, in which a group of trades is auctioned off jointly, and independent trade-by-trade auctions. Batch auctions return more total value to traders, but their outcome may be unfair, in the sense of leaving one trader worse off than under independent auctions. We propose a fair combinatorial auction: solvers bid on individual trades and on batches of trades, but a batched bid is filtered out if any trader earns less than an execution benchmark constructed from the bids on individual trades and a counterfactual mechanism. Whether fairness guarantees arise in equilibrium depends on the counterfactual mechanism: independent first-price auctions generate such guarantees; independent second-price auctions do not. These fairness guarantees come at a cost: a lower total value returned to traders.
This paper investigates which alternative benefits from vote delegation in binary collective decisions within blockchains. We begin by examining two extreme cases of voting weight distributions: Equal-Weight (EW), where each voter has equal voting weight, and Dominant-Weight (DW), where a single voter holds a majority of the voting weights before any delegation occurs. We show that vote delegation tends to benefit the ex-ante minority under EW, i.e., the alternative with a lower initial probability of winning. The converse holds under DW distribution. Through numerical simulations, we extend our findings to arbitrary voting weight distributions, showing that vote delegation benefits the ex-ante majority when it leads to a more balanced distribution of voting weights. Finally, in large communities where all agents have equal voting weight, vote delegation has a negligible impact on the outcome. As a practical consequence, vote delegation can be beneficial for blockchains with highly unbalanced voting rights, but not for those with balanced rights. In decentralized finance (DeFi), vote delegation is widely adopted to streamline governance and increase participation. However, it remains unclear when delegation actually aligns outcomes with community preferences.
Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Aadityan Ganesh, Jack Hourigan, Hannah Huh · 6 authors
Cryptographic Self-Selection is a paradigm employed by modern Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols to select a block-proposing "leader." Algorand [Chen and Micali, 2019] proposes a canonical protocol, and Ferreira et al. [2022] establish bounds $f(α,β)$ on the maximum fraction of rounds a strategic player can lead as a function of their stake $α$ and a network connectivity parameter $β$. While both their lower and upper bounds are non-trivial, there is a substantial gap between them (for example, they establish $f(10\%,1) \in [10.08\%, 21.12\%]$), leaving open the question of how significant of a concern these manipulations are. We develop computational methods to provably nail $f(α,β)$ for any desired $(α,β)$ up to arbitrary precision, and implement our method on a wide range of parameters (for example, we confirm $f(10\%,1) \in [10.08\%, 10.15\%]$). Methodologically, estimating $f(α,β)$ can be phrased as estimating to high precision the value of a Markov Decision Process whose states are countably-long lists of real numbers. Our methodological contributions involve (a) reformulating the question instead as computing to high precision the expected value of a distribution that is a fixed-point of a non-linear sampling operator, and (b) provably bounding the error induced by various truncations and sampling estimations of this distribution (which appears intractable to solve in closed form). One technical challenge, for example, is that natural sampling-based estimates of the mean of our target distribution are \emph{not} unbiased estimators, and therefore our methods necessarily go beyond claiming sufficiently-many samples to be close to the mean.
The entry of new technological infrastructures into the financial markets poses serious concerns about the misuse of the economic system for illicit purposes, such as money laundering and financing of terrorism. Although there are cases in which this connection has already been discovered by malicious actors, distributed ledger technologies can nevertheless represent a powerful tool at the disposal of competent authorities to trace illicit flows and to better monitor risks in financial markets. However, this possibility may go through an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomena. The search for alternative systems to move funds, rather than the traditional financial intermediaries, such as banks, is not a new circumstance and not necessarily for criminal purposes. Nevertheless, some of the already-known value transfer systems may benefit from the use of distributed ledger technology and make their detection more difficult. The European institutions are discussing the needed legislative packages to enforce the current regulations and to extend their application to the crypto space, as well as the establishment of a new competent authority.
There have been several studies into measuring the level of decentralization in Ethereum through applying various indices to indicate the relative dominance of entities in different domains in the ecosystem. However, these indices do not capture any correlation between those different entities, that could potentially make them the subject of external coercion, or covert collusion. We propose an index that measures the relative dominance of entities based on the application of correlation factors. We posit that this approach produces a more nuanced and accurate index of decentralization.
We study long-term equilibria that arise in the token monetary policy, or tokenomics, design of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain systems that engage utility maximizing users and validators. Validators are system maintainers who get rewarded with tokens for performing the work necessary for the system to function properly, while users compete and pay with such tokens for getting a desired portion of the system service. <br/><br/>We study how the system service provision and suitable rewards schemes together can lead to equilibria with the following desirable characteristics (1) viability: the system keeps parties engaged, (2) decentralization and skin-in-the-game: multiple sufficiently invested validators are participating, (3) stability: the price path of the underlying token used to transact with the system does not change widely over time, and (4) feasibility: the mechanism is easy to implement as a smart contract, e.g., it does not require a fiat reserve on-chain to perform token buybacks or to perform bookkeeping of exponentially growing token holdings.<br/><br/>Our analysis enables us to put forward a novel generic mechanism for blockchain monetary policy that we call quantitative rewarding (QR). We investigate how to implement QR in single-token and two-token proof of stake (PoS) blockchain systems. The latter are systems that utilize one token for the users to pay the transaction fees and a different token for the validators to participate in the PoS protocol and get rewarded. Our approach demonstrates a concrete advantage of the two-token setting in terms of the ability of the QR mechanism to be realized effectively and provide good equilibria. Our analysis also reveals an inherent limitation of the single token setting in terms of implementing an effective blockchain monetary policy - a distinction that is, to the best of our knowledge, highlighted for the first time.licy - a distinction that is, to the best of our knowledge, highlighted for the first time.
Pedro Braga, Georgios Chionas, Piotr Krysta, Stefanos Leonardos · 6 authors
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has emerged as a new frontier in the design of blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose making the MEV extraction rate as part of the protocol design space. Our aim is to leverage this parameter to maintain a healthy balance between block producers (who need to be compensated) and users (who need to feel encouraged to transact). We follow the approach introduced by EIP-1559 and design a similar mechanism to dynamically update the MEV extraction rate with the goal of stabilizing it at a target value. We study the properties of this dynamic mechanism and show that, while convergence to the target can be guaranteed for certain parameters, instability, and even chaos, can occur in other cases. Despite these complexities, under general conditions, the system concentrates in a neighborhood of the target equilibrium implying high long-term performance. Our work establishes, the first to our knowledge, dynamic framework for the integral problem of MEV sharing between extractors and users.