Abstract The rise of digital currencies challenges practices of monetary sovereignty and impacts the international monetary order. Drawing on recent IPE debates about the public‐private nature of money, the critique of the “impossible trinity” and “territorial currencies,” this article explores the competition between China and the United States over and within the international monetary system. The two largest economies display strikingly divergent regulatory approaches to cryptocurrencies and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). China completely banned cryptocurrencies but became a front‐runner in developing a CBDC. It aims to expand the RMB's global role without giving up its monetary control. U.S. administrations have instead reluctantly considered regulating cryptocurrencies. Discussions on a potential digital U.S. dollar (USD) only began in 2020. Washington aims at preserving the existing cross‐border financial mechanisms and offshore infrastructure for USD‐denominated transactions and credit creation. It focuses on financial crime and maintaining the innovation dynamic of its private sector to preserve its “exorbitant privilege.” Emerging financial infrastructures and standards for digital currencies are the new technological arena for U.S.–China monetary competition.
Abstract While contemporary technological disruption is increasingly conceptualized in terms of the logic and paradoxes of the digital platform economy, discussions of FinTech have only engaged to a limited extent with these debates—particularly from an economic geographic standpoint. This chapter fills this gap by extending the Global Financial Network (GFN) framework to problematize the organizational and geographic logic of the digital platform economy in finance, and applying it to examine the impact of the digital platform model on asset management. It shows that asset management is being profoundly disrupted by what we dub digital asset management platforms—or DAMPs—which encompass services including index fund and ETF provision, robo-advising, and analytics and trading support. Like other digital platforms, DAMPs do not so much leverage technology to enhance their competitiveness within markets, as to radically restructure the market itself. Also, like other platforms, their rise has produced a winner-take-all paradox of centralization through democratization that defies predictions of technology-enabled industry decentralization. However, the logic and implications of the rise of DAMPs diverges, in other respects, from nonfinancial digital platforms, as finance has long possessed an informational intensity and regulatory and organizational fluidity characteristic of the digital platform economy. Consequently, the digital platform model has mostly developed endogenously in asset management through incremental innovation by major financial firms—in a process that has reinforced the position of leading incumbent asset management centers, and above all New York—rather than being introduced from the outside by upstart technology firms and clusters.
Lioba Heimbach, Eric Schertenleib, Roger Wattenhofer
Trade execution on Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) is automatic and does not require individual buy and sell orders to be matched. Instead, liquidity aggregated in pools from individual liquidity providers enables trading between cryptocurrencies. The largest DEX measured by trading volume, Uniswap V3, promises a DEX design optimized for capital efficiency. However, Uniswap V3 requires far more decisions from liquidity providers than previous DEX designs. In this work, we develop a theoretical model to illustrate the choices faced by Uniswap V3 liquidity providers and their implications. Our model suggests that providing liquidity on Uniswap V3 is highly complex and requires many considerations from a user. Our supporting data analysis of the risks and returns of real Uniswap V3 liquidity providers underlines that liquidity providing in Uniswap V3 is incredibly complicated, and performances can vary wildly. While there are simple and profitable strategies for liquidity providers in liquidity pools characterized by negligible price volatilities, these strategies only yield modest returns. Instead, significant returns can only be obtained by accepting increased financial risks and at the cost of active management. Thus, providing liquidity has become a game reserved for sophisticated players with the introduction of Uniswap V3, where retail traders do not stand a chance.
DeFi is short for “decentralized finance,” is a financial application which is highly secured. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) for transferring and managing crypto assets similar to managing fiat assets at present i.e., bank accounts. It gives us exposure to the global markets and alternatives to the currency we use or banking options. DeFi is connected with blockchain, which is decentralized, immutable, and that enables all computers (or nodes) on a network to hold a copy of the history of transactions. DeFi helps us to control and visibility over your money. There is no single entity that has control over, or can alter, that ledger of transactions. It also replaces the bankers and brokers that are enforcing laws against money laundering, creating an unknown economic environment that the regulators would have to traverse and DeFi can address many of the flaws in the existing financial systems, including giving the unbanked access to the financial system. DeFi is distinct as a result of it expands the utilization of blockchain from easy price transfer to complex financial use cases. DeFi products open up financial services to anyone which requires internet connection and they're largely owned and maintained by their users all over the world. So far billions of dollar’s worth of crypto has flowed through DeFi applications and it's expanding day by day. DeFi will be the future which will replace all kinds of transactions. Keywords: DeFi, Blockchain, Money laundering
The term FINTECH refers to the junction of finance and technology, as well as how they are employed to progress finance. Fintech encompasses a diverse range of industries, including education, banking, insurance technology, payments, lending, and more. Fintech also covers the digitization of assets and the use of cryptocurrency via blockchain technology. Blockchain is a ground-breaking technology that allows users to record transactions on a decentralised, distributed ledger without the use of a middleman. Cryptocurrency is a derivation of the blockchain revolution, which some refer to as "the trust machine." This paper is mainly focused on the application of block chain technology i.e., cryptocurrency that has an impact on financial sectors. This paper focused on secondary data as perceived by many researchers through the collective references with the help of several investigations conducted by the experts. This review article is a Pure research or Fundamental research in nature. The secondary data is collected from online database, journals, and e-books respectively.
Due to the widespread use of smart contracts, Ethereum has become the second-largest blockchain platform after Bitcoin. Many different types of Ethereum accounts (ICO, Mining, Gambling, etc.) also have quite active trading activities on Ethereum. Studying the transaction records of these specific Ethereum accounts is very important for understanding their particular transaction characteristics, and further labeling the pseudonymous accounts. However, traditional methods are generally based on static and global transaction networks to conduct research, ignoring useful information about dynamic changes. Our work chooses six kinds of important account labels, and builds ego networks for each kind of Ethereum account. We focus on the interaction between the target node and neighbor nodes with temporal analysis. Experiments show that there is a significant difference between various types of accounts in terms of several network features, helping us better understand their transaction patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to analyze the dynamic characteristics of Ethereum labeled accounts from the perspective of transaction ego networks.
Michael Darlin, Georgios Palaiokrassas, Leandros Tassiulas
The rise of Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) on the Ethereum blockchain has enabled the creation of lending platforms, which serve as marketplaces to lend and borrow digital currencies. Initially, we categorize the activity of lending platforms within a standard regulatory framework. We then propose an Ethereum address grouping algorithm using activity over DeFi protocols and employ a novel classification algorithm to calculate the percentage of fund flows into DeFi lending platforms that can be attributed to debt created elsewhere in the system (“debt-financed collateral”). Based on our results, we conclude that the wide-spread use of stablecoins as debt-financed collateral increases financial stability risks in the DeFi ecosystem.
2008 yılında Bitcoin icat edilmiş ve kısa zaman içinde çok sayıda yatırımcının ilgisini çekmeyi başarmıştır. Zaman ilerledikçe Bitcoin dışında başka kripto paralar işlem görmeye başlamışlardır. 2012 yılından günümüze kadar kripto paralarla gerçekleşen işlem hacimleri önemli boyutlara gelmiş durumdadır. Tüm dünyada olduğu gibi ülkemizde de kripto paralar yatırımcıların ilgisini çeken varlıklar olarak görülmektedir. Bu çalışmada Bitcoin İşlem hacimleri ile Türk bankacılık sektöründeki mevduatlar arasında uzun dönemli bir ilişkinin olup olmadığı Engle-Granger eşbütünleşme testi kullanılarak analiz edilmiştir. Yapılan analiz sonucunda, Bitcoin işlem hacimleri ile Türk bankacılık sektöründeki mevduat hacimleri arasında uzun dönemli bir ilişkinin olduğu tespit edilmiştir.
The fast-growing, market-driven demand for cryptocurrencies worries central banks, as their monetary policy could be completely undermined. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could offer a solution, yet our understanding of their design and consequences is in its infancy. This non-technical paper examines how The Bahamas has designed the Sand Dollar, the first real-world instance of a retail CBDC. It contrasts the Sand Dollar with definition-based specifications. The author then develops a scenario analysis to illustrate commercial bank risks. In this process, the central bank becomes a deposit monopolist, leading to high funding risks, disintermediation risks, and solvency risks for the commercial banking sector. This paper argues that restrictions and caps will be the new specifications of a regulatory framework for CBDCs if disintermediation in the banking sector is to be prevented. The anonymity of CBDCs is identified as a comparative disadvantage that will affect their adoption. These findings provide insight into governance problems facing central banks and coherently lead to the design of the Sand Dollar. This paper concludes by suggesting that combating cryptocurrencies is a task that cannot be solved by a CBDC.
Owing to the meteoric rise in the usage of cryptocurrencies, there has been a widespread adaptation of traditional financial applications such as lending, borrowing, margin trading, and more, to the cryptocurrency realm. In some cases, the inherently transparent and unregulated nature of cryptocurrencies leads to attacks on users of these applications. One such attack is frontrunning, where a malicious entity leverages the knowledge of currently unprocessed financial transactions submitted by users and attempts to get its own transaction(s) executed ahead of the unprocessed ones. The consequences of this can be financial loss, inaccurate transactions, and even exposure to more attacks. We propose FIRST, a framework that prevents frontrunning attacks, and is built using cryptographic protocols including verifiable delay functions and aggregate signatures. In our design, we have a federated setup for generating the public parameters of the VDF, thus removing the need for a single trusted setup. We formally analyze FIRST, prove its security using the Universal Composability framework and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of FIRST.
Jan Arvid Berg, Robin Fritsch, Lioba Heimbach, Roger Wattenhofer
Decentralized exchanges are revolutionizing finance. With their ever-growing increase in popularity, a natural question that begs to be asked is: how efficient are these new markets? We find that nearly 30% of analyzed trades are executed at an unfavorable rate. Additionally, we observe that, especially during the DeFi summer in 2020, price inaccuracies across the market plagued DEXes. Uniswap and SushiSwap, however, quickly adapt to their increased volumes. We see an increase in market efficiency with time during the observation period. Nonetheless, the DEXes still struggle to track the reference market when cryptocurrency prices are highly volatile. During such periods of high volatility, we observe the market becoming less efficient - manifested by an increased prevalence in cyclic arbitrage opportunities.
Hans Gersbach, Akaki Mamageishvili, Manvir Schneider
On several proof-of-stake blockchains, agents engaged in validating transactions can open a pool to which others can delegate their stake in order to earn higher returns. We develop a model of staking pool formation in the presence of malicious agents and establish existence and uniqueness of equilibria. We then identify potential and risk of staking pools. First, allowing for staking pools lowers blockchain security. Yet, honest stake holders obtain higher returns. Second, by choosing welfare optimal distribution rewards, staking pools prevent that malicious agents receive large rewards. Third, when pool owners can freely distribute the returns from validation to delegators, staking pools disrupt blockchain operations, since malicious agents attract most delegators by offering generous returns.
Financial technology (Fintech) is disrupting finance at a rapid pace, forcing a rethink on legacy financial regulation. In particular, the question of the regulatory treatment of crypto-assets and blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) has been a major focus of regulators and market participants since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, and further still since the crypto bubble of 2018.1 Yet, a more general question is even more important: How should innovation and the use of only partially understood technology be regulated? In Europe, this was for a long time up in the air. Since the European Commission’s Fintech Action Plan of 2018 signalled a determination to make beneficial use of technical innovation,2 the Commission has taken a broad approach by adopting on 24 September 2020 a new Digital Finance Package.3 That package comprised the new Digital Finance Strategy (DFS 2020)4 combined with a renewed Retail Payments Strategy,5 in an effort to ‘boost Europe’s competitiveness and innovation in the financial sector, paving the way for Europe to become a global standard-setter’.6 The Commission ‘aims to boost responsible innovation in the EU’s financial sector, especially for highly innovative digital start-ups, while mitigating any potential risks related to investor protection, money laundering and cyber-crime’.7
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) services are moving traditional financial operations to the Internet of Value (IOV) by exploiting smart contracts, distributed ledgers, and clever heterogeneous transactions among different protocols. The exponential increase of the Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi foreshadows a bright future for automated money transfers in a plethora of services. In this short survey paper, we describe the business model for different DeFi domains - namely, Protocols for Loanable Funds (PLFs), Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), and Yield Aggregators. We claim that the current state of the literature is still unclear how to value thousands of different competitors (tokens) in DeFi. With this work, we abstract the general business model for different DeFi domains and compare them. Finally, we provide open research challenges that will involve heterogeneous domains such as economics, finance, and computer science.
The banking sector faces significant challenges in managing operational and transactional risks, which can result in financial losses, inefficiencies, and reputational damage. With its unique attributes of decentralization, transparency, immutability, and advanced cryptographic security, blockchain technology offers a transformative solution to these challenges. This paper explores the role of blockchain in mitigating operational risks, such as human error, fraud, and system failures, through automation, enhanced auditability, and process accountability. It also examines how distributed ledger technology addresses transactional risks by improving payment security, minimizing settlement delays, and enhancing data integrity. The paper highlights the key benefits of blockchain adoption for risk management and provides recommendations for its effective implementation, including the need for regulatory adaptation, technological investment, and cross-sector collaboration. This analysis underscores the potential of blockchain to revolutionize banking operations and strengthen risk management frameworks in the financial sector.
Bit coin might be known as the first crypto currency, the truth holds that it has been the first successful attempt towards the path of decentralized world that paved the way for vast technological advances bring forth thousands of coins in the new online world.Based on respective block chains and operated as a peer-to-peer network, its security is guaranteed by cryptographic algorithms instead of the sovereigns of the respective countries and has the potential to become a major means of payment for ecommerce, trading and as it forays into the art world who knows what the future of block chain holds.Instead of serving one country or some countries, block chain serves the entire world.
In this paper, we evaluate the economic value of a blockchain application. In the context of asset-backed securities (ABS) issuance in China, where some ABS are issued with blockchain technology and others are not, we find that the use of blockchain significantly reduces the coupon yield at issuance. Compared with other ABS, those issued using blockchain technology experience a decrease of 31.4 basis points in the yield spread, which corresponds to a relative decrease of 13%. We further document that the effect of blockchain is more pronounced for ABS deals rated by less reputable credit rating agencies and agencies that rely more on issuers for their rating business, for revolving ABS, and for ABS with a larger number of underlying assets. We also find that the use of blockchain can reduce the level of retained interest and number of credit enhancement mechanisms. This paper contributes to the literature by providing a small-sample analysis of the economic value of a blockchain application in financial markets. This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting. Funding: X. Chen and Q. Cheng acknowledge funding provided by the Lee Kong Chian Professorship at Singapore Management University. This work was supported by Singapore Ministry of Education [Grant MOE-T2EP40120-0005]. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4671 .
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a new financial infrastructure with applications similar to traditional financial products, such as exchange, lending, derivatives, and asset management. This paper empirically investigates Yearn finance, one of the fastest-growing and largest in DeFi yield aggregator protocols for on-chain asset management, to demonstrate the flow-performance relationship and compare it with mutual funds in traditional finance. According to the findings, there is a positive non-linear relationship between fund flows and recent performance for using stablecoin deposited. In contrast, we cannot find this relationship for using cryptocurrency.�Then, we look further into stablecoin holder behaviour and our findings show that, on average, they prefer the leverage strategy, which offers a chance of higher returns. Finally, we examine the event study of internal and external changes to see how investors respond. For the internal changes, the publication of deploying new strategies for both stablecoin and cryptocurrency vault does not affect investors' immediate reaction. However, only stablecoin holders have directly responded to protocol partners' announcement of the partnership�with Yearn finance for external changes.