Monetary systems comprise various layers of real and financial assets arranged hierarchically. Due to its properties, Bitcoin is a suitable asset to become the base money of a monetary system once its price has stabilized and people see it more like a medium of exchange than an investment. We review Bitcoin’s characteristics and explain their effect on its intra- and inter-temporal liquidity. We argue that Bitcoin will lower its bid-ask spread once users adopt financial assets convertible to Bitcoin. We propose the use of three financial assets working as Bitcoin derivatives to reduce Bitcoin’s demand shocks and lower its volatility: real bills, private scrip and cash notes. We explain when will this process take place and why people would have an incentive to rely on credit even under a Bitcoin standard.
Abstract The tokenization of financial assets using blockchain technology is a transformative process that allows for the fractionalization of ownership, thereby creating more accessible investment opportunities compared to traditional financial assets. Recent research has shown that token offerings are subject to moral hazard and fraud. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel token design that is compliant with the legal framework of Switzerland. Our design is characterized by its flexibility and can represent any yield or dividend-bearing asset, such as stocks, bonds, or rental income from real estate. Further enhancing its compatibility, the token conforms to the Ethereum ERC-20 standard, enabling seamless integration with existing decentralized finance solutions. Another contribution of our token design is its innovative approach to dividend distribution. Unlike traditional models that distribute dividends based on ownership at the time of payment, our token design distributes dividends based on holding times. This distinctive approach promotes smoother asset prices between dividend payouts by eliminating the need for compensation payments. Our token prototype represents a potential starting point for future research on leveraging the opportunities of decentralized finance.
There is a noted rise in research examining the influence of digital transformation-specifically the application of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) on the progression of the financial sector.This paper presents conclusions from a study on participants' awareness, understanding, and intentions regarding cryptocurrencies and the Digital Euro.Participants have a relatively high awareness of digital assets and Digital Euro, but better understanding is needed through effective communication and educational initiatives.While recognizing cryptocurrencies as valuable investments, participants are skeptical about their use for payments due to concerns about illicit activities.Regulatory frameworks are deemed important to address these concerns.Participants support the introduction of the Digital Euro and intend to use it for various purposes, suggesting potential demand.Desired characteristics include privacy, ease of use, and cross-border usability.These findings inform the strategies for introducing and accepting the Digital Euro, promoting financial inclusion, and enhancing accessibility in Europe's digital economy.
Web3 is a ground-breaking invention that has the ability to address the shortcomings of web1 and web2. The industry witnessing its major impact is the finance sector. A wave of innovation in traditional finance has been inspired by the introduction of Web3. It is also referred to as the decentralised web and is a developing movement that is upending conventional finance by providing a more open, safe, and decentralised substitute. Traditional banking should work to adopt the features that Web3 offers, including stability, scalability, interoperability, security, performance, extensibility, management, and openness. In order for TradFi to maintain its relevance and expertise in the face of the widespread adoption of digital financial modes, it is now necessary to embrace several Web3 capabilities. Keeping into consideration the relevance and importance of Web3 in finance, this chapter will basically focus on analysing the key features and characteristics of Web3 in comparison to traditional finance.
Cryptocurrencies provide a unique opportunity to identify how derivatives impact spot markets. They are fully fungible and trade across multiple spot exchanges at different prices, and futures contracts were selectively introduced on Bitcoin (BTC) exchange rates against the U.S. dollar (USD) in December 2017. Following the futures introduction, we find a significantly greater increase in cross-exchange price synchronicity for BTC–USD relative to other exchange rate pairs as demonstrated by an increase in price correlations and a reduction in arbitrage opportunities and volatility. We also find support for an increase in price efficiency, market quality, and liquidity. The evidence suggests that futures contracts allowed investors to circumvent arbitrage frictions associated with short-sale constraints, arbitrage risk associated with block confirmation time, and market segmentation. Overall, our analysis supports the view that the introduction of BTC–USD futures was beneficial to the Bitcoin spot market by making the underlying prices more informative. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, Special Section of Management Science: Blockchains and Crypto Economics. Funding: The authors acknowledge financial support from the Global Risk Institute. P. Augustin acknowledges financial support from the Canadian Derivatives Institute and from the Canada Research Chair Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada. The paper has benefited significantly from a fellow visit of P. Augustin at the Center for Advanced Studies Foundations of Law and Finance funded by the German Research Foundation, project FOR 2774, and from a visiting position of P. Augustin at the finance department of the University of Luxembourg facilitated through the Inter Mobility Programme of the Luxembourg National Research Fund. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4900 .
Financial markets have recently suffered from an increased interest of users of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance solutions. Although Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been designed based on smart contracts and leave out third-party intermediaries, these platforms sometimes require information from the outside world, such as exchange rates or prices. DeFi Oracles are the link solution between the on-chain world and the off-chain universe. This article describes the oracles, including taxonomy, governance and use cases. Thereafter, it considers their potential and, at the same time, addresses the possible risk that they present, which could impact the future DeFi space.
Money is money, securities are securities, and banking is banking. Their fundamentals are not changed by whether technology rails are centralized (classic) or pseudo-decentralized (virtual assets) – the song remains the same. As such, this paper does not reinvent the wheel on why we should regulate cryptoasset centralized exchanges (CEXs), as there is enough bibliography from today to the XVII century to go around on that. Instead, we focus on how to regulate the CEXs, which comes into play in a world where their distributed ledger technology (DLT) rails are off-the-grid and hinder regulators from: (i) collecting market data (information asymmetry); and (ii) practical enforcement (technology/operational asymmetry). After revising current regulatory practices from various countries, we identify grounds for a practical approach – we propose that regulators might enforce full trading/financial intermediation obligations on the CEXs by enacting an indirect regulation/gatekeeper scheme, as inspired by the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). In this model, regulators would restrict traditional institutions (i.e., banks, broker-dealers, clearings, funds) from transacting with CEXs which do not provide adequate evidence of material compliance with their trading/financial intermediation obligations. On a final remark, we narrate a growing movement which aims to insulate non-compliant crypto from the financial systems altogether, avoiding risks of contagion.
Türkiye, Brezilya, Hindistan, Güney Afrika ve Endonezya'nın ekonomik büyümelerini finanse etmek için istikrarsız yabancı yatırımlara olan yüksek bağımlılıkları nedeniyle, bu ülkeler “Kırılgan Beşli” ülke olarak adlandırılmıştır. Aynı zamanda Global Crypto Adoption Index'e göre, bu ülkeler kripto para birimlerine yatırım yapma konusunda oldukça aktiflerdir. Bu çalışmada “Kırılgan Beşli” ülkeler dikkate alınarak Bitcoin ve finansal varlıklar arasındaki uzun dönemli asimetrik ilişki Ağustos 2010 - Temmuz 2022 dönemine ait aylık veriler baz alınarak ARDL ve NARDL yöntemleri ile incelenmiştir. Pozitif ve negatif Bitcoin şoklarından kaynaklanan dinamik çarpanların doğrusal kombinasyonu, beş ülkenin tümü için NARDL üzerinden Dinamik çarpan testine başvurarak grafikleri çizilmiştir. Sonuçlar, Bitcoin'in tüm borsa endekslerine olumlu bir etkisi olmasına rağmen, yalnızca Türkiye ve Hindistan'daki değişkenlerin eş bütünleşik olduğunu göstermektedir. Bitcoin'in olumsuz şoklarının Türkiye'de daha derin ve baskın etkiye sahip olduğu anlaşılmıştır. Ancak, Bitcoin’in olumlu şoklarının Hindistan'da daha baskın olduğu sonucuna rastlanmıştır.
This article will look at the financial geographies and legacies of neo-colonialism to critique the emergence of blockchain financialization in the developing world. Blockchain “financialization” advances through the interplay of crypto imaginaries, new platform economies, and the trading infrastructure for highly leveraged financial products. The largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has presented itself as a champion of the blockchain for development paradigm in Africa. Its success in the region relies on the use of community leaders, hackathons, and the lobbying of governments for regulatory concessions. Binance operates on two scales. Firstly, it is part of a fintech vanguard attempting to dismantle New Deal financial regulatory systems in the Global North (Omarova, Yale Journal on Regulation, 2019, 36, 735–793; Allen, H, DeFi: Shadow Banking 2.0?, 2022). Secondly, it as an agent of financialization in the developing world, promoting DeFi to map the speculative micro-financial practices of the Global South. Crypto and blockchain thus represent extensions of “subprime empire” (Schuster, Current Anthropology, 2021, 62, 389–411) in which marginal economic activities in fragile developing world contexts feed into the North-South extraction of value. This article will outline Binance’s forays into Nigeria as an example of the micro and macro scales of neocolonial finance and the interplay of infrastructure, territory, and the social imaginary in blockchain.
Abstract Bitcoin enthusiasts argue that it is free from central banks decisions and it is a hedge against inflation. Using high-frequency monetary surprises associated with decisions made by the Fed and the ECB, I show that these claims are not supported by the data. Bitcoin systemically reacts to monetary and central bank information shocks. I find that these reactions vary over time: not only by changing the magnitude but sometimes sign of reaction. Fed’s disinflationary shocks increase Bitcoin price, while the ECB’s decrease, hence providing little support for it as an inflation hedge.
Ze Chen, Ruichao Jiang, Javad Tavakoli, Yiqiang Q. Zhao
In this article we show that Theorem 2 in Lie et al. (2023) is incorrect. Since Wombat Exchange, a decentralized exchange, is built upon Lie et al. (2023) and Theorem 2 is fundamental to Wombat Finance, we show that an undesirable phenomenon, which we call the robbed withdrawal, can happen as a consequence.
DEX, or decentralized exchange, is a prominent class of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on blockchains, attracting a total locked value worth tens of billions of USD today.This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study that uncovers unfair trades on popular DEX services on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC). By joining and analyzing 60 million transactions, we find 671, 400 unfair trades on all six measured DEXes, including Uniswap, Balancer, and Curve. Out of these unfair trades, we attribute 55, 000 instances, with high confidence, to token thefts that cause a value loss of more than 3.88 million USD. Furthermore, the measurement study uncovers previously unknown causes of extractable value and real-world adaptive strategies to these causes. Finally, we propose countermeasures to redesign secure DEX protocols and to harden deployed services against the discovered security risks.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) was not well understood when it came into the spotlight in 2019. In 2020, it scaled fast and increased from $700 million at the beginning of 2020 to $15 billion by the end of 2020, and as of June 2022, the total value locked (TVL) reached a high of $256 billion. What explains this remarkable increase? The current financial system has left 1.7 billion people unbanked. The barriers to entry are high, the costs are high, transparency is low, and a small group of powerful elites dominates it. DeFi offers an accessible alternative to the current financial system. It explains its exponential borrowing, lending, yield farming, and insurance growth. Early results suggest that DeFi will redefine the financial system. This chapter provides an overview of DeFi, an analysis of its ecosystem, and its likely trajectory.
Shahin Ramezany, Rachsuda Setthawong, Pisal Setthawong
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been on a roller coaster of swift changes for some years. In the DeFi world, the principal ingredients are smart contracts, which are often vulnerable to security issues. To work with these contracts, transaction submission is required. Arguably, advances in transaction analysis can benefit a whole Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and non-EVM networks alike. Unfortunately, only a few open-source tools and commercial products exist that focus specifically on transactions. This research studies real-time event-driven EVM transaction monitoring and experiments with its effectiveness in performing the enormous task of transaction analysis and compares it with historical analysis approaches. In this study, EVM events were studied extensively, and Midnight, an open-source, full-stack proof of concept framework was used to experiment with the alternative approach. The research included a practical experiment on monitoring specific events called flash loan on the latest version of the popular DeFi protocol called AAVE.
Lioba Heimbach, Eric Schertenleib, Roger Wattenhofer
The transaction ordering dependency of the smart contracts building decentralized exchanges (DEXes) allow for predatory trading strategies. In particular, front-running attacks present a constant risk for traders on DEXes. Whereas legal regulation outlaws most front-running practices in traditional finance, such measures are ineffective in preventing front-running on DEXes. While novel market designs hindering front-running may emerge, it remains unclear whether the market's participants, in particular, liquidity providers, would be willing to adopt these new designs. A misalignment of the participant's private incentives and the market's social incentives can hinder the market from adopting an effective prevention mechanism. We present a game-theoretic model to study the behavior of sophisticated traders, retail traders, and liquidity providers in DEXes. Sophisticated traders adjust for front-running attacks, while retail traders do not, likely due to lack of knowledge or irrationality. Our findings show that with less than 1% of order flow from retail traders, traders' and liquidity providers' interests align with the market's social incentives - eliminating front-running attacks. However, the benefit from embracing this novel market is often small and may not suffice to entice them. With retail traders making up a larger proportion (around 10%) of the order flow, liquidity providers tend to stay in pools that do not protect against front-running. This suggests both educating traders and providing additional incentives for liquidity providers are necessary for market self-regulation.
The financial services industry has a long history of deploying new technology to respond to evolving customer expectations. The rise of digital banking in recent years represents a significant acceleration of technological change, fuelled by factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and shifting demographics. In the vanguard of sweeping industry changes are the FinTech providers. Advances such as cloud computing APIs and machine learning are being deployed to deliver seamless, 24/7 finance and banking services to consumers who now expect immediate, accessible digital solutions that provide both safety and convenience. Banks need to keep up with the incredible pace of change but face challenges in the form of entrenched legacy systems, siloed operations, a vast beachfront of propositional enhancements and compliance with regulations — issues that typical single-minded FinTechs are less burdened with. Many banks, however, are seeking to overcome these challenges, knowing that otherwise they face diminished market relevance. For many, the answer lies in partnering with existing FinTechs in mutually beneficial engagements that can deliver for increasingly digitally savvy users, such as a partnership between Barclays and TransferMate to deliver advanced cross-border payment services. Regulatory developments like Open Banking have set the scene for increased market competition as well as integrated disparate systems between multiple providers for the benefit of the end user. Onto this stage have entered traditional big-tech firms like Apple, Amazon Google and Meta, seeking opportunities to reshape the digital payments space. In parallel with these developments has emerged decentralised finance (DeFi) offerings that leverage concepts like Blockchain technology, smart contracts and distributed ledgers to provide solutions outside of the centralised processes of traditional finance. This paper explores the changing shape of digital banking; the potential for both competition and collaboration between banks, FinTechs and traditional tech companies; and examines how consumer demands are driving innovation.
The emerging world of decentralized finance (DeFi), facilitated by smart contracts operating on blockchain networks, has been notable both for its rapid growth and the high-profile collapses of several of its largest participants. In this paper, we provide a technical account of the financial mechanisms which facilitated the growth and eventual collapse of the Terra Network. From this analysis, we outline a generalizable economic theory of blockchains which aims to differentiate the economics of blockchains as programmable environments from blockchains as accounting ledgers for crypto-assets. This adds to the existing literature on crypto-assets, which largely focuses on the financial characteristics of the crypto-assets themselves rather than their underlying blockchains. We argue that DeFi is structured so as to offer consumers distinct blockchain networks as competing choices differentiated by several key characteristics. We test several implications of this theory using Terra's collapse as a natural experiment, finding evidence that bridges between programmable blockchain networks create increased risk of spillover effects to other blockchains' programmable environments in the wake of a major shock event like Terra's collapse. Specifically, blockchains suffered a time-bound loss of market share and the likelihood of this loss grew approximately 40% for each additional bridge that was deployed in common with Terra at the time of Terra’s collapse.
<p><big>Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity over the past five to six years. Most recently, events like the FTX bankruptcy fueled the interest in regulation. Moreover, it is possible that the FTX event disrupting the cryptocurrency market was a factor in Silicon Valley Bank&#39;s failure. While several countries consider regulation, from soft regulation, like Japan, to more rigid standards, like the total ban in China, we study the effect of other news or events on cryptocurrency prices. This paper looks at historical closing prices for Bitcoin, the largest of the cryptocurrencies, and how prices react to various events. Then we focus on modeling the time series considering an &#39;event,&#39; China&#39;s ban on cryptocurrency exchanges, using intervention analysis. We find that intervention analysis provides a reliable approach to quantifying the impact regulation may have on cryptocurrency pricing.</big></p>
The Intersection of Cryptocurrency and Securities Law has been discussed in various legal contexts in the present scenario. The rise of cryptocurrencies has put forth fresh challenges for investors as well as regulators and there is a need for clear direction on how to interpret the transactions that include digital currencies. The advent of crypto exchanges has formed an entire ecosystem of services and participants, who are looking to provide liquidity, exploit price differences for profit, and support the investments. The focus of the study is to investigate the legal and regulatory steps taken to include cryptocurrencies within securities law. The paper will delve into the distinctive attributes of cryptocurrencies and analyse the different regulations in which they can be classified as securities. Moreover, it will inspect the fluctuating regulatory strategies adopted by various countries and entities, such as the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (SIC), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and others.