Follow blockchain research across journals, conferences, and preprint repositories.
6,121 results · page 25 of 256
Davide Mancino, Luca Pennella
No abstract is available for this record.
David Krause
No abstract is available for this record.
Badr Farih
No abstract is available for this record.
Milan Jevtić
Digital assets have become a significant and indispensable part of the modern financial system and have brought innovations in the areas of payments, investments, and financial intermediation. However, their expansion brings numerous regulatory challenges, particularly with regard to preventing money laundering, user identification, the legal treatment of decentralized finance, and privacy protection. Approaches to the regulation of digital assets vary significantly among jurisdictions - while some countries introduce comprehensive legislation, others apply restrictive or fragmented policies. Serbia has positioned itself as one of the first countries in the region to adopt a specific Law on Digital Assets (2020), thereby establishing a regulatory framework for this market. This paper analyses the legal challenges of digital assets, exploring national and international regulatory approaches, including the European Union's MiCA Regulation. It also examines the need to strike a balance between fostering innovation and ensuring the stability of the financial system. The key finding is that continuous international cooperation and a flexible regulatory framework are necessary to enable the sustainable development of digital assets and the technologies that support them.
Davide Sperolini
No abstract is available for this record.
Zining Wang, Jiaxin Duan, Fangyuan Kou
No abstract is available for this record.
Steven Paul Nohr
<b><i>Liquidity Exit Drain</i></b>, also referred to as a <b><i>Rug Stream</i></b>, describes a class of gradual capital extraction attacks in decentralized finance (DeFi) and stablecoin ecosystems. Unlike abrupt rug pulls or discrete exploit-based failures, Liquidity Exit Drains operate through prolonged, cumulative actions that remain within protocol-defined operational and governance boundaries. By exploiting trust persistence, governance opacity, and parameter flexibility, these attacks systematically siphon liquidity over extended time horizons while evading conventional audits and user detection. This paper formalizes <b><i>Liquidity Exit Drain</i></b> as a distinct economic attack class, examines its structural enablers and execution patterns, and outlines why existing security, audit, and monitoring frameworks frequently fail to detect it. The analysis highlights the need for longitudinal economic oversight and governance-aware risk assessment beyond static code correctness.
David Krause
No abstract is available for this record.
David Krause
No abstract is available for this record.
Vanessa Villanueva Collao
No abstract is available for this record.
Osama Wagdi
No abstract is available for this record.
Siddharth Jain, Divyansh Jain
The pervasive volatility and structural complexity of decentralized assets present significant challenges for modern portfolio management. This paper introduces Coin Quest, a novel, high-fidelity cryptocurrency tracking and risk management platform designed to address critical shortcomings in existing market solutions, notably high data latency and the deficiency of robust quantitative risk tools. Our technical proposal mandates a resilient microservices architecture centered on Apache Kafka for high-throughput, low-latency data stream ingestion, ensuring real-time portfolio valuation across disparate exchanges and blockchains. The analytical core of Coin Quest implements the Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) framework to compute Value at Risk (VaR) and the superior measure, Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), recognizing the non-normal return distributions inherent to crypto assets. Furthermore, we detail specialized algorithms necessary for comprehensive tracking and valuation of complex Decentralized Finance (DeFi) positions, including the calculation of Impermanent Loss, and quantitative monitoring of NonFungible Tokens (NFTs) using floor price metrics. We conclude by outlining empirical validation requirements demonstrating the system’s capacity to maintain sub-100ms data latency and confirming the superior predictive accuracy of the MCS-based risk model against traditional historical simulations in highly volatile market environments.
Kunal Gaurav
No abstract is available for this record.
Steven Paul Nohr
<b><i>Traditional financial audits</i></b> have long served as the primary instruments for oversight, disclosure assurance, and risk assessment in regulated financial systems. These mechanisms, however, were designed for centralized institutions, periodic reporting cycles, and human-paced transaction environments. In blockchain-based systems—particularly those supporting stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), and decentralized finance (DeFi)—risk materializes continuously and often irreversibly. This paper presents a structural comparison between traditional audit models and the Crystal Validator™ (CV), a pre-execution enforcement architecture designed for real-time regulatory compliance. We demonstrate that post-fact auditing is structurally incapable of preventing modern on-chain failures, regulatory breaches, and systemic collapses. We argue that effective blockchain regulation requires a shift from retrospective verification to deterministic, pre-transaction authorization enforced at the protocol level.
Takuya Kobori, James J. Angel
No abstract is available for this record.
Filippo Caprioglio
No abstract is available for this record.
Lawrence J. Trautman
No abstract is available for this record.
Steven Paul Nohr
Flash loans enable uncollateralized borrowing within a single transaction, providing capital efficiency and arbitrage opportunities in decentralized finance (DeFi). However, when combined with composable protocols and reactive state changes, flash loans can induce feedback loops that amplify liquidity, manipulate pricing signals, and bypass economic safeguards. This paper defines Flash Loan Feedback Loops as recursive transaction patterns in which temporary liquidity repeatedly influences protocol state, enabling extraction of value without proportional risk exposure. We analyze structural conditions that permit such loops, demonstrate why existing mitigations are insufficient, and propose a logic-layer enforcement framework that constrains state-dependent recursion. The approach restores causal integrity between capital commitment and protocol outcomes, addressing a core systemic vulnerability in DeFi architectures.
Bowei Zhang, Hanbing Liu, Qixin Tian, Siyu Chen · 6 authors
Smart Contracts are the foundation of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), executing financial logic without trusted intermediaries.Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have substantially lowered the barrier to smart contract development by enabling code generation from natural language.However, because smart contracts are immutable and directly manage financial assets, this accessibility introduces a critical trust gap: generated contracts are easy to produce but hard to trust.To bridge this gap, We present LeVer, the first trustworthy smart contract synthesis framework that integrates LLM-based generation with Lean-based autoformalization and Verification.LeVer employs a closed-loop multi-agent architecture to iteratively generate, verify, attack, and repair contracts, providing both formal guarantees and empirical robustness.To facilitate the adoption of automated formal verification in smart contract generation and audition, we opensource our framework and datasets at:
Steven Paul Nohr
High-yield decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocols attract capital by offering returns that exceed organically sustainable market demand. This paper defines <b><i>Anchor Protocol Overexposure</i></b><b> </b>as a systemic risk condition in which outsized, subsidy-driven yields concentrate liquidity into a single mechanism, creating hidden leverage, correlated withdrawal behavior, and reflexive collapse dynamics. Using Anchor Protocol as a representative archetype, the paper analyzes how yield subsidies, composability, and perception-driven stability interact to generate unsustainable exposure across interconnected DeFi ecosystems. We further demonstrate why transparency, disclosure, and governance-based controls fail to mitigate this class of risk. Finally, the paper outlines a logic-layer enforcement model capable of constraining yield-induced systemic fragility prior to the onset of collapse dynamics.
Seth Oranburg
No abstract is available for this record.
Steven Paul Nohr
Decentralized systems are increasingly required to operate across heterogeneous environments involving human presence, real-world assets, regulatory constraints, and adversarial network conditions. Traditional execution models, which assume static infrastructure, context-free computation, and pre-authorized identities, are insufficient for these emerging requirements. This paper introduces a Presence-Centric execution architecture that binds computational validity to verifiable environmental state at execution time. The proposed system is structured around two core components: the Crystal Validator, a context-aware validation layer, and an AI Feedback Loop, which enables adaptive policy enforcement based on observed outcomes. Central to this architecture is <b><i>Environment-Coupled Execution</i></b>, a model in which identity, intent, policy, and environment are jointly evaluated to determine execution validity. By treating environment as a first-class execution dependency, the system enables contextual non-repudiation, replay resistance, regulatory determinism, and post-execution auditability. The proposed approach is applicable to decentralized finance, stablecoins, real-world asset tokenization, governance systems, and presence-driven digital platforms.
Steven Paul Nohr
<b><i>Governance Voter Loop Reuse</i></b> is a strategic exploit in decentralized finance (DeFi) governance systems whereby the same economic capital is repeatedly reused to exert voting influence across multiple proposals, epochs, or governance venues without maintaining sustained economic exposure. By exploiting snapshot-based voting, token mobility, and weak binding between voting power and duration of risk, attackers can artificially amplify governance influence while avoiding long-term commitment. This paper formalizes the exploit, analyzes its structural enablers and execution mechanisms, and evaluates its systemic impact on DAO legitimacy and protocol security. We further propose mitigation requirements centered on time-weighted exposure, continuity-aware governance models, and behavioral detection mechanisms.
Steven Paul Nohr
Decentralized finance and stablecoin systems rely extensively on off-chain data oracles to supply price feeds, reserve attestations, and external state signals. While often treated as neutral data providers, oracles constitute a critical enforcement surface vulnerable to coercion, capture, and strategic manipulation. This paper defines <b><i>Off-Chain Data Oracle Coercion</i></b> as a systemic risk whereby economic, governance, or infrastructural pressures distort oracle outputs without violating cryptographic correctness. We demonstrate how oracle coercion enables silent value extraction, destabilizes stablecoin pegs, and undermines regulatory compliance. A validator-enforced, logic-layer control model is proposed to restore oracle neutrality and ensure continuous, verifiable data integrity under MiCA-aligned supervision.