Blockchain Papers

Isabela Ruiz Roque da Silva, Nizam Omar

No abstract is available for this record.

William J. Luther, Nikhil Sridhar

No abstract is available for this record.

Jeongmin Lee, Christine A. Parlour, Uday Rajan

No abstract is available for this record.

Winston Wei Dou, Xiang Fang, Andrew W. Lo, Harald Uhlig

No abstract is available for this record.

Min Dai, Wei Jiang, Steven Kou, Cong Qin

No abstract is available for this record.

Joshua R. Hendrickson, William J. Luther

The emergence of Bitcoin poses an important question for monetary theorists: can Bitcoin compete with, or even replace existing fiat monies? To answer this question, one must be able to determine what gives intrinsically useless monies their value, what determines the coexistence of alternative monies, and under what conditions economic agents would prefer to hold one money relative to another. We attempt to answer these questions in light of the emergence of Bitcoin. In particular, we outline a theoretical model in which an intrinsically useless money is essential.

David Murakami, Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj

We rationalize cryptocurrency adoption in a small open economy model. We show that digital dollarization, where stablecoins pegged to the USD are used for transactions, can improve social welfare. In contrast, the adoption of volatile cryptocurrencies, such as El Salvador’s 2021 decision to make Bitcoin legal tender, results in welfare losses. This outcome aligns with the observed low take-up of Bitcoin as legal tender. The welfare benefits of digital dollarization increase with the magnitude of macroeconomic shocks, providing motivation for the growing use of stablecoins in emerging markets as a safeguard against high inflation and macroeconomic instability .

Zhixiu Yu

This paper uses a search-theoretic model to study conditions under which cryptocurrency is valued and under which it coexists with fiat money. In my model, a cryptocurrency economy is one in which private agents’ decisions determine the stock of money and in which the marginal cost of producing money is increasing in the existing nominal stock. I show that the inflation rate of cryptocurrency must be zero in a stationary monetary equilibrium. This result is in sharp contrast to models with fiat money in which the stock of money is exogenously given. In fiat money economies, the inflation rate is determined by the rate of growth of the money stock. My result is also in sharp contrast with other types of private money economies, in which the inflation rate must necessarily be different from zero. In such private money economies, the cost of producing additional money does not depend on the existing nominal stock. Moreover, I show that cryptocurrency and fiat money can circulate at the same time and that the rates of return on these two assets may not be the same. Competition with cryptocurrency restricts the government’s ability to over-issue fiat money and thereby might improve on pure fiat money equilibria without government commitment.

Joshua S. Gans, Neil Gandal

No abstract is available for this record.

Volha Uladzimirayna Paliashchuk

Today, financial system and all its services are completely centralized. Banks, exchanges, insurance companies and other financial institutions have someone in charge that controls these services. This centralized financial system, or CeFi, has its own risks. What if we decentralized the financial system in the same way that Bitcoin decentralized money?

Kanis Saengchote

One of the benefits of decentralized finance (DeFi) – an alternative financial system built on blockchain – is composability, which means the system's building blocks (tokens) can freely interact with one another to form new services. One example is stablecoin, a token with fixed exchange rate, which is backed by token collaterals. While stablecoins can be used to facilitate payments and exchanges, in DeFi they can be used to earn returns (“yield farming†), potentially multiplicatively. We use transaction-level blockchain data to analyze a stablecoin's flows between protocols and provide suggestive evidence of DeFi yield-chasing behavior. We shed light on what DeFi total value locked might really measure and highlight the complexity in DeFi analysis and market surveillance.

Carol Alexander, Jun Deng, Jianfen Feng, Huning Wan

Bitcoin prices are driven by upward as well as downward jumps and so the bitcoin implied volatility surface behaves differently from those of established options markets. We analyze tick-level Deribit option price data, demonstrating increasing support for the limits-to-arbitrage hypothesis. Hence market makers are managing order imbalance and inventory more effectively as Deribit bitcoin options trading volumes increases. On the demand side, volatility traders drive both at-the-money and out-of-the-money option prices, the latter also being driven by directional traders. Directional effects were most pronounced during the price bubble of 2021. Further refinements of our tests assess time-to-maturity and time-of-day effects.

Massimo Bartoletti, James Hsin-yu Chiang, Alberto Lluch Lafuente

Automated market makers (AMMs) are one of the most prominent decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. AMMs allow users to trade different types of crypto-tokens, without the need to find a counter-party. There are several implementations and models for AMMs, featuring a variety of sophisticated economic mechanisms. We present a theory of AMMs. The core of our theory is an abstract operational model of the interactions between users and AMMs, which can be concretised by instantiating the economic mechanisms. We exploit our theory to formally prove a set of fundamental properties of AMMs, characterizing both structural and economic aspects. We do this by abstracting from the actual economic mechanisms used in implementations, and identifying sufficient conditions which ensure the relevant properties. Notably, we devise a general solution to the arbitrage problem, the main game-theoretic foundation behind the economic mechanisms of AMMs.

Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Qi Feng, Eugenio Grippo

One of the exciting recent developments in decentralized finance (DeFi) has been the development of decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges that can autonomously handle conversion between different cryptocurrencies. Decentralized exchange protocols such as Uniswap, Curve and other types of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) maintain a liquidity pool (LP) of two or more assets constrained to maintain at all times a mathematical relation to each other, defined by a given function or curve. Examples of such functions are the constant-sum and constant-product AMMs. Existing systems however suffer from several challenges. They require external arbitrageurs to restore the price of tokens in the pool to match the market price. Such activities can potentially drain resources from the liquidity pool. In particular, dramatic market price changes can result in low liquidity with respect to one or more of the assets and reduce the total value of the LP. We propose in this work a new approach to constructing the AMM by proposing the idea of dynamic curves. It utilizes input from a market price oracle to modify the mathematical relationship between the assets so that the pool price continuously and automatically adjusts to be identical to the market price. This approach eliminates arbitrage opportunities and, as we show through simulations, maintains liquidity in the LP for all assets and the total value of the LP over a wide range of market prices.

Kose John, Thomas J Rivera, Fahad Saleh

No abstract is available for this record.

Ye Li, Simon Mayer

No abstract is available for this record.

Raphael Auer, Cyril Monnet, Hyun Song Shin

No abstract is available for this record.

Hanna Hałaburda, Zhiguo He, Jiasun Li

No abstract is available for this record.

Emiliano Pagnotta

Abstract We address the determination of bitcoin prices and decentralized security. Users forecast the transactional and resale values of holdings, pricing the risk of systemic attacks. Miners contribute resources to protect against attackers and compete for block rewards. Bitcoin’s design leads to multiple equilibria: the same blockchain technology is consistent with sharply different price and security levels. Bitcoin’s monetary policy can lead to welfare losses and deviations from quantity theory. Price-security feedback amplifies fundamental shocks’ volatility impact and leads to boom and busts unconnected to fundamentals. We characterize how viability versus fiat currency depends on bitcoin’s relative acceptability and inflation protection.

Qi Luo, Romesh Saigal

Multiagent incentive contracts are advanced techniques for solving decentralized decision-making problems with asymmetric information. The principal designs contracts aiming to incentivize non-cooperating agents to act in his or her interest. Due to the asymmetric information, the principal must balance the efficiency loss and the security for keeping the agents. We prove both the existence conditions for optimality and the uniqueness conditions for computational tractability. The coupled principal-agent problems are converted to solving a Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation with equilibrium constraints. Extending the incentive contract to a multiagent setting with history-dependent terminal conditions opens the door to new applications in corporate finance, institutional design, and operations research.

Eli M. Noam

Cryptocurrencies provide an important dimension of innovation to the evolution of the exchange medium we call money. There are now close to 2,000 such currencies, and their potential and volume is growing. The impact of such currencies for money laundering, law enforcement, and banking supervision have been extensively discussed on the transaction level. But this is the “micro” level of analysis. What has been rare is a “macro” level discussion of the impact on the monetary system of a country. Central banks, which are institutions tasked with providing monetary stability, will see their problems rise while the power of their traditional tools to control money supply and interest rates – such as reserve requirements and the discount rates – is declining. But the new digital technologies – such as distributed ledgers – and new approaches provide regulatory bodies also with new and potentially powerful tools. The task for central banks and policy makers is to create new approaches to use, regulate, and incent them in shaping the macro-economic path of their economy. The paper will propose several of these approaches. This is of particular importance in an economic recovery post coronavirus. In the process, central banks will also, predictably, issue their own digital currencies, and a tiny number of those will become global super-currencies. This will create a new type of issues.

Ronald J. Balvers, Bill McDonald

No abstract is available for this record.

Andrew Spurr, Marcel Ausloos

Abstract We study the fundamental differences that separate: Litecoin; Bitcoin Gold; Bitcoin Cash; Ethereum; and Zcash from Bitcoin, and draw some analysis to how these features are appreciated by the market, to ultimately make an inference as to how future successful cryptocurrencies may be invented and behave. We use Google Trend data, as well as price, volume and market capitalization data sourced from coinmarketcap.com to support this analysis. We find that Litecoin’s shorter block times offer benefits in commerce, but drawbacks in the mining process through orphaned blocks. Zcash holds a niche use for anonymous transactions, benefitting areas of the world lacking in economic freedom. Bitcoin Cash suffers from centralization in the mining process, while the greater decentralization of Bitcoin Gold has generally left it to stagnate. Ether’s greater functionality offers the greatest threat to Bitcoin’s dominance in the market. A coin that incorporates several of these features can be technically better than Bitcoin, but the first-to-market advantage of Bitcoin should keep its dominant position in the market.

Claudia Cristina Bozza, Marcelo Cabús Klötzle, Antônio Carlos Figueiredo Pinto, Paulo Vítor Jordão da Gama Silva

Este trabalho buscou avaliar a existência do efeito de feedback trading para as criptomoedas Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin e Dash usando o modelo VAR proposto por Hasbrouck (1991). Este efeito busca avaliar a utilização de dados passados para tomar decisões futuras, utilizando para tanto, dados de alta frequência, divididos em quatro períodos (dia, hora, minuto e segundo) para captar a existência do efeito de feedback trading nas criptomoedas, visando contribuir para a linha de finanças comportamentais, uma vez que há poucos estudos que avaliam o investimento em mercados digitais seguindo uma perspectiva comportamental. O resultado do modelo indica a existência de feedback trading negativo para todas as criptomoedas nas granularidades de tempo segundo e minuto. O estudo também aponta como resultado do modelo a existência de feedback trading negativo para a granularidade de tempo hora a hora para Litecoin e Dash.