This article presents an empirical investigation into the determinants of total revenue generated by counterfeit tokens on Uniswap. It offers a detailed overview of the counterfeit token fraud process, along with a systematic summary of characteristics associated with such fraudulent activities observed in Uniswap. The study primarily examines the relationship between revenue from counterfeit token scams and their defining characteristics, and analyzes the influence of market economic factors such as return on market capitalization and price return on Ethereum. Key findings include a significant increase in overall transactions of counterfeit tokens on their first day of fraud, and a rise in upfront fraud costs leading to corresponding increases in revenue. Furthermore, a negative correlation is identified between the total revenue of counterfeit tokens and the volatility of Ethereum market capitalization return, while price return volatility on Ethereum is found to have a positive impact on counterfeit token revenue, albeit requiring further investigation for a comprehensive understanding. Additionally, the number of subscribers for the real token correlates positively with the realized volume of scam tokens, indicating that a larger community following the legitimate token may inadvertently contribute to the visibility and success of counterfeit tokens. Conversely, the number of Telegram subscribers exhibits a negative impact on the realized volume of scam tokens, suggesting that a higher level of scrutiny or awareness within Telegram communities may act as a deterrent to fraudulent activities. Finally, the timing of when the scam token is introduced on the Ethereum blockchain may have a negative impact on its success. Notably, the cumulative amount scammed by only 42 counterfeit tokens amounted to almost 11214 Ether.
In this paper, we analyze traders' behavior within both centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), focusing on the volatility of Bitcoin prices and the trading activity of investors engaged in perpetual future contracts. We categorize the architecture of perpetual future exchanges into three distinct models, each exhibiting unique patterns of trader behavior in relation to trading volume, open interest, liquidation, and leverage. Our detailed examination of DEXs, especially those utilizing the Virtual Automated Market Making (VAMM) Model, uncovers a differential impact of open interest on long versus short positions. In exchanges which operate under the Oracle Pricing Model, we find that traders primarily act as price takers, with their trading actions reflecting direct responses to price movements of the underlying assets. Furthermore, our research highlights a significant propensity among less informed traders to overreact to positive news, as demonstrated by an increase in long positions. This study contributes to the understanding of market dynamics in digital asset exchanges, offering insights into the behavioral finance for future innovation of decentralized finance.
We propose a novel approach to marked Hawkes kernel inference which we name the moment-based neural Hawkes estimation method. Hawkes processes are fully characterized by their first- and second-order statistics through a Fredholm integral equation of the second kind. Using recent advances in solving partial differential equations with physics-informed neural networks, we provide a numerical procedure to solve this integral equation in high dimension. Together with an adapted training pipeline, we give a generic set of hyperparameters that produces robust results across a wide range of kernel shapes. We conduct an extensive numerical validation on simulated data. We finally propose two applications of the method to the analysis of the microstructure of cryptocurrency markets. In a first application, we extract the influence of volume on the arrival rate of BTC-USD trades and in a second application we analyze the causality relationships and their directions amongst a universe of 15 cryptocurrency pairs in a centralized exchange.
We study a new "laminated" queueing model for orders on batched trading venues such as decentralised exchanges. The model aims to capture and generalise transaction queueing infrastructure that has arisen to organise MEV activity on public blockchains such as Ethereum, providing convenient channels for sophisticated agents to extract value by acting on end-user order flow by performing arbitrage and related HFT activities. In our model, market orders are interspersed with orders created by arbitrageurs that under idealised conditions reset the marginal price to a global equilibrium between each trade, improving predictability of execution for liquidity traders. If an arbitrageur has a chance to land multiple opportunities in a row, he may attempt to manipulate the execution price of the intervening market order by a probabilistic blind sandwiching strategy. To study how bad this manipulation can get, we introduce and bound a price manipulation coefficient that measures the deviation from global equilibrium of local pricing quoted by a rational arbitrageur. We exhibit cases in which this coefficient is well approximated by a "zeta value' with interpretable and empirically measurable parameters.
Kenan Wood, Maurice Herlihy, Hammurabi Mendes, Jonad Pulaj
An automated market maker (AMM) is a state machine that manages pools of assets, allowing parties to buy and sell those assets according to a fixed mathematical formula. AMMs are typically implemented as smart contracts on blockchains, and its prices are kept in line with the overall market price by arbitrage: if the AMM undervalues an asset with respect to the market, an "arbitrageur" can make a risk-free profit by buying just enough of that asset to bring the AMM's price back in line with the market. AMMs, however, are not designed for assets that expire: that is, assets that cannot be produced or resold after a specified date. As assets approach expiration, arbitrage may not be able to reconcile supply and demand, and the liquidity providers that funded the AMM may have excessive exposure to risk due to rapid price variations. This paper formally describes the design of a decentralized exchange (DEX) for assets that expire, combining aspects of AMMs and limit-order books. We ensure liveness and market clearance, providing mechanisms for liquidity providers to control their exposure to risk and adjust prices dynamically in response to situations where arbitrage may fail.
We study the temporal evolution of the holding-time distribution of bitcoins and find that the average distribution of holding-time is a heavy-tailed power law extending from one day to over at least $200$ weeks with an exponent approximately equal to $0.9$, indicating very long memory effects. We also report significant sample-to-sample variations of the distribution of holding times, which can be best characterized as multiscaling, with power-law exponents varying between $0.3$ and $2.5$ depending on bitcoin price regimes. We document significant differences between the distributions of book-to-market and of realized returns, showing that traders obtain far from optimal performance. We also report strong direct qualitative and quantitative evidence of the disposition effect in the Bitcoin Blockchain data. Defining age-dependent transaction flows as the fraction of bitcoins that are traded at a given time and that were born (last traded) at some specific earlier time, we document that the time-averaged transaction flow fraction has a power law dependence as a function of age, with an exponent close to $-1.5$, a value compatible with priority queuing theory. We document the existence of multifractality on the measure defined as the normalized number of bitcoins exchanged at a given time.
This paper conducts an extensive analysis of Bitcoin return series, with a primary focus on three volatility metrics: historical volatility (calculated as the sample standard deviation), forecasted volatility (derived from GARCH-type models), and implied volatility (computed from the emerging Bitcoin options market). These measures of volatility serve as indicators of market expectations for conditional volatility and are compared to elucidate their differences and similarities. The central finding of this study underscores a notably high expected level of volatility, both on a daily and annual basis, across all the methodologies employed. However, it's crucial to emphasize the potential challenges stemming from suboptimal liquidity in the Bitcoin options market. These liquidity constraints may lead to discrepancies in the computed values of implied volatility, particularly in scenarios involving extreme moneyness or maturity. This analysis provides valuable insights into Bitcoin's volatility landscape, shedding light on the unique characteristics and dynamics of this cryptocurrency within the context of financial markets.
Concentrated liquidity (CL) provisioning is a way how to improve the capital efficiency of Automated Market Makers (AMM). Allowing liquidity providers to use leverage is a step towards even higher capital efficiency. A number of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols implement this technique in conjunction with overcollateralized lending. However, the properties of leveraged CL positions have not been formalized and are poorly understood in practice. This article describes the principles of a leveraged CL provisioning protocol, formally models the notions of margin level, assets, and debt, and proves that within this model, leveraged LP positions possess several properties that make them safe to use.
Viraj Nadkarni, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni, Pramod Viswanath
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are essential in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) as they match liquidity supply with demand. They function through liquidity providers (LPs) who deposit assets into liquidity pools. However, the asset trading prices in these pools often trail behind those in more dynamic, centralized exchanges, leading to potential arbitrage losses for LPs. This issue is tackled by adapting market maker bonding curves to trader behavior, based on the classical market microstructure model of Glosten and Milgrom. Our approach ensures a zero-profit condition for the market maker's prices. We derive the differential equation that an optimal adaptive curve should follow to minimize arbitrage losses while remaining competitive. Solutions to this optimality equation are obtained for standard Gaussian and Lognormal price models using Kalman filtering. A key feature of our method is its ability to estimate the external market price without relying on price or loss oracles. We also provide an equivalent differential equation for the implied dynamics of canonical static bonding curves and establish conditions for their optimality. Our algorithms demonstrate robustness to changing market conditions and adversarial perturbations, and we offer an on-chain implementation using Uniswap v4 alongside off-chain AI co-processors.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are decentralized digital tokens to represent the unique ownership of items. Recently, NFTs have been gaining popularity and at the same time bringing up issues, such as scams, racism, and sexism. Decentralization, a key attribute of NFT, contributes to some of the issues that are easier to regulate under centralized schemes, which are intentionally left out of the NFT marketplace. In this work, we delved into this centralization-decentralization dilemma in the NFT space through mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. Centralization-decentralization dilemma is the dilemma caused by the conflict between the slogan of decentralization and the interests of stakeholders. We first analyzed over 30,000 NFT-related tweets to obtain a high-level understanding of stakeholders' concerns in the NFT space. We then interviewed 15 NFT stakeholders (both creators and collectors) to obtain their in-depth insights into these concerns and potential solutions. Our findings identify concerning issues among users: financial scams, counterfeit NFTs, hacking, and unethical NFTs. We further reflected on the centralization-decentralization dilemma drawing upon the perspectives of the stakeholders in the interviews. Finally, we gave some inferences to solve the centralization-decentralization dilemma in the NFT market and thought about the future of NFT and decentralization.
We extend the application and test the performance of a recently introduced volatility prediction framework encompassing LSTM and rough volatility. Our asset class of interest is cryptocurrencies, at the beginning of the "crypto-winter" in 2022. We first show that to forecast volatility, a universal LSTM approach trained on a pool of assets outperforms traditional models. We then consider a parsimonious parametric model based on rough volatility and Zumbach effect. We obtain similar prediction performances with only five parameters whose values are non-asset-dependent. Our findings provide further evidence on the universality of the mechanisms underlying the volatility formation process.
Perpetual swaps are derivative contracts that allow traders to speculate on, or hedge, the price movements of cryptocurrencies. Unlike futures contracts, perpetual swaps have no settlement or expiration in the traditional sense. The funding rate acts as the mechanism that tethers the perpetual swap to its underlying with the help of arbitrageurs. Open interest, in the context of perpetual swaps and derivative contracts in general, refers to the total number of outstanding contracts at a given point in time. It is a critical metric in derivatives markets as it can provide insight into market activity, sentiment and overall liquidity. It also provides a way to estimate a lower bound on the collateral required for every cryptocurrency market on an exchange. This number, cumulated across all markets on the exchange in combination with proof of reserves, can be used to gauge whether the exchange in question operates with unsustainable levels of leverage, which could have solvency implications. We find that open interest in Bitcoin perpetual swaps is systematically misquoted by some of the largest derivatives exchanges; however, the degree varies, with some exchanges reporting open interest that is wholly implausible to others that seem to be delaying messages of forced trades, i.e., liquidations. We identify these incongruities by analyzing tick-by-tick data for two time periods in $2023$ by connecting directly to seven of the most liquid cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges.
This paper proposes a novel approach to hedging portfolios of risky assets when financial markets are affected by financial turmoils. We introduce a completely novel approach to diversification activity not on the level of single assets but on the level of ensemble algorithmic investment strategies (AIS) built based on the prices of these assets. We employ four types of diverse theoretical models (LSTM - Long Short-Term Memory, ARIMA-GARCH - Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average - Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity, momentum, and contrarian) to generate price forecasts, which are then used to produce investment signals in single and complex AIS. In such a way, we are able to verify the diversification potential of different types of investment strategies consisting of various assets (energy commodities, precious metals, cryptocurrencies, or soft commodities) in hedging ensemble AIS built for equity indices (S&P 500 index). Empirical data used in this study cover the period between 2004 and 2022. Our main conclusion is that LSTM-based strategies outperform the other models and that the best diversifier for the AIS built for the S&P 500 index is the AIS built for Bitcoin. Finally, we test the LSTM model for a higher frequency of data (1 hour). We conclude that it outperforms the results obtained using daily data.
High-frequency trading (HFT) uses computer algorithms to make trading decisions in short time scales (e.g., second-level), which is widely used in the Cryptocurrency (Crypto) market (e.g., Bitcoin). Reinforcement learning (RL) in financial research has shown stellar performance on many quantitative trading tasks. However, most methods focus on low-frequency trading, e.g., day-level, which cannot be directly applied to HFT because of two challenges. First, RL for HFT involves dealing with extremely long trajectories (e.g., 2.4 million steps per month), which is hard to optimize and evaluate. Second, the dramatic price fluctuations and market trend changes of Crypto make existing algorithms fail to maintain satisfactory performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose an Efficient hieArchical Reinforcement learNing method for High Frequency Trading (EarnHFT), a novel three-stage hierarchical RL framework for HFT. In stage I, we compute a Q-teacher, i.e., the optimal action value based on dynamic programming, for enhancing the performance and training efficiency of second-level RL agents. In stage II, we construct a pool of diverse RL agents for different market trends, distinguished by return rates, where hundreds of RL agents are trained with different preferences of return rates and only a tiny fraction of them will be selected into the pool based on their profitability. In stage III, we train a minute-level router which dynamically picks a second-level agent from the pool to achieve stable performance across different markets. Through extensive experiments in various market trends on Crypto markets in a high-fidelity simulation trading environment, we demonstrate that EarnHFT significantly outperforms 6 state-of-art baselines in 6 popular financial criteria, exceeding the runner-up by 30% in profitability.
As cryptocurrency evolved, new financial instruments, such as lending and borrowing protocols, currency exchanges, fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFT), staking and mining protocols have emerged. A financial ecosystem built on top of a blockchain is supposed to be fair and transparent for each participating actor. Yet, there are sophisticated actors who turn their domain knowledge and market inefficiencies to their strategic advantage; thus extracting value from trades not accessible to others. This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that blockchain-based markets and decentralized finance (DeFi) instruments are mostly unregulated. Though a large body of work has already studied the unfairness of different aspects of DeFi and cryptocurrency trading, the economic intricacies of non-fungible token (NFT) trades necessitate further analysis and academic scrutiny. The trading volume of NFTs has skyrocketed in recent years. A single NFT trade worth over a million US dollars, or marketplaces making billions in revenue is not uncommon nowadays. While previous research indicated the presence of wrongdoings in the NFT market, to our knowledge, we are the first to study predatory trading practices, what we call opportunistic trading, in depth. Opportunistic traders are sophisticated actors who employ automated, high-frequency NFT trading strategies, which, oftentimes, are malicious, deceptive, or, at the very least, unfair. Such attackers weaponize their advanced technical knowledge and superior understanding of DeFi protocols to disrupt trades of unsuspecting users, and collect profits from economic situations that are inaccessible to ordinary users, in a "supposedly" fair market. In this paper, we explore three such broad classes of opportunistic strategies aiming to realize three distinct trading objectives, viz., acquire, instant profit generation, and loss minimization.
Current approaches to the cryptocurrency automated market makers result in poor impermanent loss and capital efficiency. We analyze the mechanics underlying DODO Exchange's proactive market maker (PMM) to probe for solutions to these issues, leading to our key insight of multi-token trading pools. We explore this paradigm primarily through the construction of a generalization of PMM, the multi-token token proactive market maker (MPMM). We show via simulations that MPMM has better impermanent loss and capital efficiency than comparable market makers under a variety of market scenarios. We also test multi-token generalizations of other common 2-token pool market makers. Overall, this work demonstrates several advantages of multi-token pools and introduces a novel multi-token pool market maker.
We take inspiration from statistical physics to develop a novel conceptual framework for the analysis of financial markets. We model the order book dynamics as a motion of particles and define the momentum measure of the system as a way to summarise and assess the state of the market. Our approach proves useful in capturing salient financial market phenomena: in particular, it helps detect the market manipulation activities called spoofing and layering. We apply our method to identify pathological order book behaviours during the flash crash of the LUNA cryptocurrency, uncovering widespread instances of spoofing and layering in the market. Furthermore, we establish that our technique outperforms the conventional Z-score-based anomaly detection method in identifying market manipulations across both LUNA and Bitcoin cryptocurrency markets.
Guillermo Angeris, Tarun Chitra, Theo Diamandis, Alex Evans · 5 authors
Constant function market makers (CFMMs) are the most popular type of decentralized trading venue for cryptocurrency tokens. In this paper, we give a very general geometric framework (or 'axioms') which encompass and generalize many of the known results for CFMMs in the literature, without requiring strong conditions such as differentiability or homogeneity. One particular consequence of this framework is that every CFMM has a (unique) canonical trading function that is nondecreasing, concave, and homogeneous, showing that many results known only for homogeneous trading functions are actually fully general. We also show that CFMMs satisfy a number of intuitive and geometric composition rules, and give a new proof, via conic duality, of the equivalence of the portfolio value function and the trading function. Many results are extended to the general setting where the CFMM is not assumed to be path-independent, but only one trade is allowed. Finally, we show that all 'path-independent' CFMMs have a simple geometric description that does not depend on any notion of a 'trading history'.
Historically, gold and silver have played distinct roles in traditional monetary systems. While gold has primarily been revered as a superior store of value, prompting individuals to hoard it, silver has commonly been used as a medium of exchange. As the financial world evolves, the emergence of cryptocurrencies has introduced a new paradigm of value and exchange. However, the store-of-value characteristic of these digital assets remains largely uncharted. Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, once likened Bitcoin to gold and Litecoin to silver. To validate this analogy, our study employs several metrics, including unspent transaction outputs (UTXO), spent transaction outputs (STXO), Weighted Average Lifespan (WAL), CoinDaysDestroyed (CDD), and public on-chain transaction data. Furthermore, we've devised trading strategies centered around the Price-to-Utility (PU) ratio, offering a fresh perspective on crypto-asset valuation beyond traditional utilities. Our back-testing results not only display trading indicators for both Bitcoin and Litecoin but also substantiate Lee's metaphor, underscoring Bitcoin's superior store-of-value proposition relative to Litecoin. We anticipate that our findings will drive further exploration into the valuation of crypto assets. For enhanced transparency and to promote future research, we've made our datasets available on Harvard Dataverse and shared our Python code on GitHub as open source.
We propose an ensemble method to improve the generalization performance of trading strategies trained by deep reinforcement learning algorithms in a highly stochastic environment of intraday cryptocurrency portfolio trading. We adopt a model selection method that evaluates on multiple validation periods, and propose a novel mixture distribution policy to effectively ensemble the selected models. We provide a distributional view of the out-of-sample performance on granular test periods to demonstrate the robustness of the strategies in evolving market conditions, and retrain the models periodically to address non-stationarity of financial data. Our proposed ensemble method improves the out-of-sample performance compared with the benchmarks of a deep reinforcement learning strategy and a passive investment strategy.
Cryptocurrency trading represents a nascent field of research, with growing adoption in industry. Aided by its decentralised nature, many metrics describing cryptocurrencies are accessible with a simple Google search and update frequently, usually at least on a daily basis. This presents a promising opportunity for data-driven systematic trading research, where limited historical data can be augmented with additional features, such as hashrate or Google Trends. However, one question naturally arises: how to effectively select and process these features? In this paper, we introduce Multi-Factor Inception Networks (MFIN), an end-to-end framework for systematic trading with multiple assets and factors. MFINs extend Deep Inception Networks (DIN) to operate in a multi-factor context. Similar to DINs, MFIN models automatically learn features from returns data and output position sizes that optimise portfolio Sharpe ratio. Compared to a range of rule-based momentum and reversion strategies, MFINs learn an uncorrelated, higher-Sharpe strategy that is not captured by traditional, hand-crafted factors. In particular, MFIN models continue to achieve consistent returns over the most recent years (2022-2023), where traditional strategies and the wider cryptocurrency market have underperformed.
Marcin Wątorek, Maria Skupień, Jarosław Kwapień, Stanisław Drożdż
This paper investigates the temporal patterns of activity in the cryptocurrency market with a focus on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and WINkLink from January 2020 to December 2022. Market activity measures - logarithmic returns, volume, and transaction number, sampled every 10 seconds, were divided into intraday and intraweek periods and then further decomposed into recurring and noise components via correlation matrix formalism. The key findings include the distinctive market behavior from traditional stock markets due to the nonexistence of trade opening and closing. This was manifest in three enhanced-activity phases aligning with Asian, European, and U.S. trading sessions. An intriguing pattern of activity surge in 15-minute intervals, particularly at full hours, was also noticed, implying the potential role of algorithmic trading. Most notably, recurring bursts of activity in bitcoin and ether were identified to coincide with the release times of significant U.S. macroeconomic reports such as Nonfarm payrolls, Consumer Price Index data, and Federal Reserve statements. The most correlated daily patterns of activity occurred in 2022, possibly reflecting the documented correlations with U.S. stock indices in the same period. Factors that are external to the inner market dynamics are found to be responsible for the repeatable components of the market dynamics, while the internal factors appear to be substantially random, which manifests itself in a good agreement between the empirical eigenvalue distributions in their bulk and the random matrix theory predictions expressed by the Marchenko-Pastur distribution. The findings reported support the growing integration of cryptocurrencies into the global financial markets.
We focus on the problem of market making in high-frequency trading. Market making is a critical function in financial markets that involves providing liquidity by buying and selling assets. However, the increasing complexity of financial markets and the high volume of data generated by tick-level trading makes it challenging to develop effective market making strategies. To address this challenge, we propose a deep reinforcement learning approach that fuses tick-level data with periodic prediction signals to develop a more accurate and robust market making strategy. Our results of market making strategies based on different deep reinforcement learning algorithms under the simulation scenarios and real data experiments in the cryptocurrency markets show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in terms of profitability and risk management.
This work is about optimal order execution, where a large order is split into several small orders to maximize the implementation shortfall. Based on the diversity of cryptocurrency exchanges, we attempt to extract cross-exchange signals by aligning data from multiple exchanges for the first time. Unlike most previous studies that focused on using single-exchange information, we discuss the impact of cross-exchange signals on the agent's decision-making in the optimal execution problem. Experimental results show that cross-exchange signals can provide additional information for the optimal execution of cryptocurrency to facilitate the optimal execution process.