arXiv subjects

Benjamin Kraner

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Kraner.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

When Staking Rewards Compound: Measuring the Impact of Ethereum's Pectra Upgrade

Ethereum's beacon chain hosts over 920,000 active validators, a number inflated by the legacy 32 ETH stake cap. The Pectra upgrade (May 2025) addresses this by introducing 0x02 compounding validators, raising the maximum stake per validator from 32 to 2,048 ETH and enabling automatic reward reinvestment. This paper examines how compounding affects consensus-layer rewards, whether higher balances provide execution-layer advantages, and whether the APR uplift justifies migration for different staker types. We analyse adoption patterns across solo stakers and staking providers, investigate the role of consolidation (merging multiple 32 ETH validators into one) in early migration, and identify barriers slowing the transition. Through simulation, we find that compounding provides roughly +5% relative consensus-layer APR uplift for small balances, diminishing to under 1% for large staking providers. Empirical analysis of all active beacon chain validators shows 0x02 validators achieving modestly higher median CL APR. Solo stakers show higher relative adoption but face operational barriers, whilst providers cite infrastructure costs and protocol constraints. The results suggest that without improved reward accessibility and stronger economic incentives, 0x02 migration will remain gradual despite its network efficiency benefits.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Clustering Deposit and Withdrawal Activity in Tornado Cash: A Cross-Chain Analysis

Tornado Cash is a decentralised mixer that uses cryptographic techniques to sever the on-chain trail between depositors and withdrawers. In practice, however, its anonymity can be undermined by user behaviour and operational quirks. We conduct the first cross-chain empirical study of Tornado Cash activity on Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, and Polygon, introducing three clustering heuristics-(i) address-reuse, (ii) transactional-linkage, and (iii) a novel first-in-first-out (FIFO) temporal-matching rule. Together, these heuristics reconnect deposits to withdrawals and deanonymise a substantial share of recipients. Our analysis shows that 5.1 - 12.6% of withdrawals can already be traced to their originating deposits through address reuse and transactional linkage heuristics. Adding our novel First-In-First-Out (FIFO) temporal-matching heuristic lifts the linkage rate by a further 15 - 22 percentage points. Statistical tests confirm that these FIFO matches are highly unlikely to occur by chance. Comparable leakage across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, and Polygon indicates chain-agnostic user misbehaviour, rather than chain-specific protocol flaws. These results expose how quickly cryptographic guarantees can unravel in everyday use, underscoring the need for both disciplined user behaviour and privacy-aware protocol design. In total, our heuristics link over $2.3 billion in Tornado Cash withdrawals to identifiable deposits, exposing significant cracks in practical anonymity.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

The Impact of Sanctions on decentralised Privacy Tools: A Case Study of Tornado Cash

This paper investigates the impact of sanctions on Tornado Cash, a smart contract protocol designed to enhance transaction privacy. Following the U.S. Department of the Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash in August 2022, platform activity declined sharply. We document a significant and sustained reduction in transaction volume, user diversity, and overall protocol utilization after the sanctions were imposed. Our analysis draws on transaction data from three major blockchains: Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, and Polygon. We further examine developments following the partial lifting and eventual removal of sanctions by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in March 2025. Although activity partially recovered, the rebound remained limited. The Tornado Cash case illustrates how regulatory interventions can affect decentralized protocols, while also highlighting the challenges of fully enforcing such measures in decentralized environments.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Money in Motion: Micro-Velocity and Usage of Ethereums Liquid Staking Tokens

We introduce a micro-velocity framework for analysing the on-chain circulation of Lidos liquid-staking tokens, stETH, and its wrapped ERC-20 form, wstETH. By reconstructing full transfer and share-based accounting histories, we compute address-level velocities and decompose them into behavioural components. Despite their growing importance, the micro-level monetary dynamics of LSTs remain largely unexplored. Our data reveal persistently high velocity for both tokens, reflecting intensive reuse within DeFi. Yet activity is highly concentrated: a small cohort of large addresses, likely institutional accounts, are responsible for most turnover, while the rest of the users remain largely passive. We also observe a gradual transition in user behavior, characterized by a shift toward wstETH, the non-rebasing variant of stETH. This shift appears to align with DeFi composability trends, as wstETH is more frequently deployed across protocols such as AAVE, Spark, Balancer, and SkyMoney. To make the study fully reproducible, we release (i) an open-source pipeline that indexes event logs and historical contract state, and (ii) two public datasets containing every Transfer and TransferShares record for stETH and wstETH through 2024-11-08. This is the first large-scale empirical characterisation of liquid-staking token circulation. Our approach offers a scalable template for monitoring staking asset flows and provides new, open-access resources to the research community.

cs.ET↗

arXiv2024

An Improved Algorithm to Identify More Arbitrage Opportunities on Decentralized Exchanges

In decentralized exchanges (DEXs), the arbitrage paths exist abundantly in the form of both arbitrage loops (e.g. the arbitrage path starts from token A and back to token A again in the end, A, B,..., A) and non-loops (e.g. the arbitrage path starts from token A and stops at a different token N, A, B,..., N). The Moore-Bellman-Ford algorithm, often coupled with the ``walk to the root" technique, is commonly employed for detecting arbitrage loops in the token graph of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as Uniswap. However, a limitation of this algorithm is its ability to recognize only a limited number of arbitrage loops in each run. Additionally, it cannot specify the starting token of the detected arbitrage loops, further constraining its effectiveness in certain scenarios. Another limitation of this algorithm is its incapacity to detect non-loop arbitrage paths between any specified pairs of tokens. In this paper, we develop a new method to solve these problems by combining the line graph and a modified Moore-Bellman-Ford algorithm (MMBF). This method can help to find more arbitrage loops by detecting at least one arbitrage loop starting from any specified tokens in the DEXs and can detect the non-loop arbitrage paths between any pair of tokens. Then, we applied our algorithm to Uniswap V2 and found more arbitrage loops and non-loops indeed compared with applying the Moore-Bellman-Ford (MBF) combined algorithm. The found arbitrage profit by our method in some arbitrage paths can be even as high as one million dollars, far larger than that found by the MBF combined algorithm. Finally, we statistically compare the distribution of arbitrage path lengths and the arbitrage profit detected by both our method and the MBF combined algorithm, and depict how potential arbitrage opportunities change with time by our method.

q-fin.CP↗

arXiv2024

SoK: Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) and Emerging Trends in Restaking

Liquid staking and restaking represent recent innovations in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that garnered user interest and capital. Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs), tokenized representations of staked tokens on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains, are the leading staking method. LSTs offer users the ability to earn staking rewards while maintaining liquidity, enabling seamless integration into DeFi protocols and free tradeability. Restaking builds upon this concept by allowing staked tokens, LSTs or native Bitcoin tokens to secure additional protocols and PoS chains for supplementary rewards. Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs) unlock liquidity of restaked assets. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) establishes a comprehensive framework for the technical and economic models of liquid staking protocols. Using this framework, we systematically compare protocols mechanics, including node operator selection, staking reward distribution, and slashing. Our empirical analysis of token performance reveals that protocol design and market dynamics impact token market value. We further present the recent developments in restaking and discuss associated risks and security implications. Lastly, we review the emerging literature on liquid staking and restaking.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Liquid Staking Tokens in Automated Market Makers

This paper studies liquid staking tokens (LSTs) on automated market makers (AMMs), both theoretically and empirically. LSTs are tokenized representations of staked assets on proof-of-stake blockchains. First, we model LST-liquidity on AMMs theoretically, categorizing suitable AMM types for LST liquidity and deriving formulas for the necessary returns from trading fees to adequately compensate liquidity providers under the particular price trajectories of LSTs. For the latter, two relevant metrics are considered: (1) losses compared to holding the liquidity outside the AMM (loss-versus-holding, or "impermanent loss"), and (2) the relative profitability compared to fully staking the capital (loss-versus-staking) which is specifically tailored to the case of LST-liquidity. Next, we empirically measure these metrics for Ethereum LSTs across the most relevant AMM pools. We find that, while trading fees often compensate for impermanent loss, fully staking is more profitable for many pools, raising questions about the sustainability of the current LST liquidity allocation to AMMs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Analyzing Reward Dynamics and Decentralization in Ethereum 2.0: An Advanced Data Engineering Workflow and Comprehensive Datasets for Proof-of-Stake Incentives

Ethereum 2.0, as the preeminent smart contract blockchain platform, guarantees the precise execution of applications without third-party intervention. At its core, this system leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which utilizes a stochastic process to select validators for block proposal and validation, consequently rewarding them for their contributions. However, the implementation of blockchain technology often diverges from its central tenet of decentralized consensus, presenting significant analytical challenges. Our study collects consensus reward data from the Ethereum Beacon chain and conducts a comprehensive analysis of reward distribution and evolution, categorizing them into attestation, proposer and sync committee rewards. To evaluate the degree of decentralization in PoS Ethereum, we apply several inequality indices, including the Shannon entropy, the Gini Index, the Nakamoto Coefficient, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). Our comprehensive dataset is publicly available on Harvard Dataverse, and our analytical methodologies are accessible via GitHub, promoting open-access research. Additionally, we provide insights on utilizing our data for future investigations focused on assessing, augmenting, and refining the decentralization, security, and efficiency of blockchain systems.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

Empirical and Theoretical Analysis of Liquid Staking Protocols

Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning staking rewards without the disadvantage of locking the capital at the validators. Yet, they are seen by some as a threat to the Proof-of-Stake blockchain security. This paper is the first work that classifies liquid staking implementations. It analyzes the historical performance of major liquid staking tokens in comparison to the traditional staking for the largest Proof-of-Stake blockchains. Furthermore, the research investigates the impact of centralization, maximum extractable value and the migration of Ethereum from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake on the tokens' performance. Examining the tracking error of the liquid stacking providers to the staking rewards shows that they are persistent and cannot be explained by macro-variables of the currency, such as the variance or return.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Cross-border Exchange of CBDCs using Layer-2 Blockchain

This paper proposes a novel multi-layer blockchain architecture for the cross-border trading of CBDCs. The permissioned layer-2, by relying on the public consensus of the underlying network, assures the security and integrity of the transactions and ensures interoperability with domestic CBDCs implementations. Multiple Layer-3s operate various Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and compete with each other for the lowest costs. To provide insights into the practical implications of the system, simulations of trading costs are conducted based on historical FX rates, with Project Mariana as a benchmark. The study shows that, even with liquidity fragmentation, a multi-layer and multi-AMM setup is more cost-efficient than a single AMM.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Time Moves Faster When There is Nothing You Anticipate: The Role of Time in MEV Rewards

This study explores the intricacies of waiting games, a novel dynamic that emerged with Ethereum's transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based block proposer selection protocol. Within this PoS framework, validators acquire a distinct monopoly position during their assigned slots, given that block proposal rights are set deterministically, contrasting with Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols. Consequently, validators have the power to delay block proposals, stepping outside the honest validator specs, optimizing potential returns through MEV payments. Nonetheless, this strategic behaviour introduces the risk of orphaning if attestors fail to observe and vote on the block timely. Our quantitative analysis of this waiting phenomenon and its associated risks reveals an opportunity for enhanced MEV extraction, exceeding standard protocol rewards, and providing sufficient incentives for validators to play the game. Notably, our findings indicate that delayed proposals do not always result in orphaning and orphaned blocks are not consistently proposed later than non-orphaned ones. To further examine consensus stability under varying network conditions, we adopt an agent-based simulation model tailored for PoS-Ethereum, illustrating that consensus disruption will not be observed unless significant delay strategies are adopted. Ultimately, this research offers valuable insights into the advent of waiting games on Ethereum, providing a comprehensive understanding of trade-offs and potential profits for validators within the blockchain ecosystem.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Agent-Based Modelling of Ethereum Consensus

This paper presents a study of the Poof-of-Stake (PoW) Ethereum consensus protocol, following the recent switch from Proof-of-Work (PoS) to Proof-of-Stake within Merge upgrade. The new protocol has resulted in reduced energy consumption and a shift in economic incentives, but it has also introduced new threat sources such as chain reorganizations and balancing attacks. Using a simple and flexible agent-based model, this study employs a time-continuous simulation algorithm to analyze the evolution of the blocktree and assess the impact of initial conditions on consensus quality. The model simulates validator node behavior and the information propagation throughout the peer-to-peer network of validators to analyze the resulting blockchain structure. Key variables in the model include the topology of the peer-to-peer network and average block and attestation latencies. Metrics to evaluate consensus quality are established, and means to observe the model's responsiveness to changes in parameters are provided. The simulations reveal a phase transition in which the system switches from a consensus state to a non-consensus state, with a theoretical justification presented for this observation.

cs.GT↗