arXiv subjects

Robin Fritsch

Publications and source records attributed to Robin Fritsch.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

MEV Capture Through Time-Advantaged Arbitrage

As blockchains begin processing significant economic activity, the ability to include and order transactions inevitably becomes highly valuable, a concept known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). This makes effective mechanisms for transaction inclusion and ordering, and thereby the extraction of MEV, a key aspect of blockchain design. Beyond traditional approaches such as ordering in a first-come-first-serve manner or using priority fees, a recent proposal suggests auctioning off a time advantage for transaction inclusion. In this paper, we investigate this time advantage mechanism, focusing specifically on arbitrage opportunities on Automated Market Makers (AMMs), one of the largest sources of MEV today. We analyze the optimal strategy for a time-advantaged arbitrageur and compare the profits generated by various MEV extraction methods. Finally, we explore how AMMs can be adapted in the time advantage setting to capture a portion of the MEV.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

SoK: Attacks on DAOs

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based organizations that facilitate decentralized governance. Today, DAOs not only hold billions of dollars in their treasury but also govern many of the most popular Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. This paper systematically analyses security threats to DAOs, focusing on the types of attacks they face. We study attacks on DAOs that took place in the past, attacks that have been theorized to be possible, and potential attacks that were uncovered and prevented in audits. For each of these (potential) attacks, we describe and categorize the attack vectors utilized into four categories. This reveals that while many attacks on DAOs take advantage of the less tangible and more complex human nature involved in governance, audits tend to focus on code and protocol vulnerabilities. Thus, additionally, the paper examines empirical data on DAO vulnerabilities, outlines risk factors contributing to these attacks, and suggests mitigation strategies to safeguard against such vulnerabilities.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Measuring Arbitrage Losses and Profitability of AMM Liquidity

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive empirical study of losses to arbitrageurs (following the formalization of loss-versus-rebalancing by [Milionis et al., 2022]) incurred by liquidity providers on automated market makers (AMMs). We show that those losses exceed the fees earned by liquidity providers across many of the largest AMM liquidity pools (on Uniswap). Remarkably, we also find that the Uniswap v2 pools are more profitable for passive LPs than their Uniswap v3 counterparts. We also investigate how arbitrage losses change with block times. As expected, arbitrage losses decrease when block production is faster. However, the rate of the decline varies significantly across different trading pairs. For instance, when comparing 100ms block times to Ethereum's current 12-second block times, the decrease in losses to arbitrageurs ranges between 20% to 70%, depending on the specific trading pair.

cs.DC↗

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↗

arXiv2023

Arbitrageurs' profits, LVR, and sandwich attacks: batch trading as an AMM design response

We study a novel automated market maker design: the function maximizing AMM (FM-AMM). Our central assumption is that trades are batched before execution. Because of competition between arbitrageurs, the FM-AMM eliminates arbitrage profits (or LVR) and sandwich attacks, currently the two main problems in decentralized finance and blockchain design more broadly. We then consider 11 token pairs and use Binance price data to simulate the lower bound to the return of providing liquidity to an FM-AMM. Such a lower bound is, for the most part, slightly higher than the empirical returns of providing liquidity on Uniswap v3 (currently the dominant AMM).

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

The Hidden Shortcomings of (D)AOs -- An Empirical Study of On-Chain Governance

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a recent innovation in organizational structures, which are already widely used in the blockchain ecosystem. We empirically study the on-chain governance systems of 21 DAOs and open source the live dataset. The DAOs we study are of various size and activity, and govern a wide range of protocols and services, such as decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, infrastructure projects and common goods funding. Our analysis unveils a high concentration of voting rights, a significant hidden monetary costs of on-chain governance systems, as well as a remarkably high amount of pointless governance activity.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

The Economics of Automated Market Makers

This paper studies the question whether automated market maker protocols such as Uniswap can sustainably retain a portion of their trading fees for the protocol. We approach the problem by modelling how to optimally choose a pool's take rate, i.e\ the fraction of fee revenue that remains with the protocol, in order to maximize the protocol's revenue. The model suggest that if AMMs have a portion of loyal trade volume, they can sustainably set a non-zero take rate, even without losing liquidity to competitors with a zero take rate. Furthermore, we determine the optimal take rate depending on a number of model parameters including how much loyal trade volume pools have and how high the competitors' take rates are.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

Understanding the Relationship Between Core Constraints and Core-Selecting Payment Rules in Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions (CAs) allow bidders to express complex preferences for bundles of goods being auctioned. However, the behavior of bidders under different payment rules is often unclear. In this paper, we aim to understand how core constraints interact with different core-selecting payment rules. In particular, we examine the natural and desirable non-decreasing property of payment rules, which states that bidders cannot decrease their payments by increasing their bids. Previous work showed that, in general, the widely used VCG-nearest payment rule violates the non-decreasing property in single-minded CAs. We prove that under a single effective core constraint, the VCG-nearest payment rule is non-decreasing. In order to determine in which auctions single effective core constraints occur, we introduce a conflict graph representation of single-minded CAs and find sufficient conditions for the single effective core constraint in CAs. Finally, we study the consequences on the behavior of the bidders and show that no over-bidding exists in any Nash equilibrium for non-decreasing core-selecting payment rules.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

Analyzing Voting Power in Decentralized Governance: Who controls DAOs?

We empirically study the state of three prominent DAO governance systems on the Ethereum blockchain: Compound, Uniswap and ENS. In particular, we examine how the voting power is distributed in these systems. Using a comprehensive dataset of all governance token holders, delegates, proposals and votes, we analyze who holds the voting rights and how they are used to influence governance decisions.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

An Empirical Study of Market Inefficiencies in Uniswap and SushiSwap

Decentralized exchanges are revolutionizing finance. With their ever-growing increase in popularity, a natural question that begs to be asked is: how efficient are these new markets? We find that nearly 30% of analyzed trades are executed at an unfavorable rate. Additionally, we observe that, especially during the DeFi summer in 2020, price inaccuracies across the market plagued DEXes. Uniswap and SushiSwap, however, quickly adapt to their increased volumes. We see an increase in market efficiency with time during the observation period. Nonetheless, the DEXes still struggle to track the reference market when cryptocurrency prices are highly volatile. During such periods of high volatility, we observe the market becoming less efficient - manifested by an increased prevalence in cyclic arbitrage opportunities.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2022

The Price of Majority Support

We consider the problem of finding a compromise between the opinions of a group of individuals on a number of mutually independent, binary topics. In this paper, we quantify the loss in representativeness that results from requiring the outcome to have majority support, in other words, the "price of majority support". Each individual is assumed to support an outcome if they agree with the outcome on at least as many topics as they disagree on. Our results can also be seen as quantifying Anscombes paradox which states that topic-wise majority outcome may not be supported by a majority. To measure the representativeness of an outcome, we consider two metrics. First, we look for an outcome that agrees with a majority on as many topics as possible. We prove that the maximum number such that there is guaranteed to exist an outcome that agrees with a majority on this number of topics and has majority support, equals $\ceil{(t+1)/2}$ where $t$ is the total number of topics. Second, we count the number of times a voter opinion on a topic matches the outcome on that topic. The goal is to find the outcome with majority support with the largest number of matches. We consider the ratio between this number and the number of matches of the overall best outcome which may not have majority support. We try to find the maximum ratio such that an outcome with majority support and this ratio of matches compared to the overall best is guaranteed to exist. For 3 topics, we show this ratio to be $5/6\approx 0.83$. In general, we prove an upper bound that comes arbitrarily close to $2\sqrt{6}-4\approx 0.90$ as $t$ tends to infinity. Furthermore, we numerically compute a better upper and a non-matching lower bound in the relevant range for $t$.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Concentrated Liquidity in Automated Market Makers

We examine how the introduction of concentrated liquidity has changed the liquidity provision market in automated market makers such as Uniswap. To this end, we compare average liquidity provider returns from trading fees before and after its introduction. Furthermore, we quantify the performance of a number of fundamental concentrated liquidity strategies using historical trade data. We estimate their possible returns and evaluate which perform best for certain trading pairs and market conditions.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2021

A Note on Optimal Fees for Constant Function Market Makers

We suggest a framework to determine optimal trading fees for constant function market makers (CFMMs) in order to maximize liquidity provider returns. In a setting of multiple competing liquidity pools, we show that no race to the bottom occurs, but instead pure Nash equilibria of optimal fees exist. We theoretically prove the existence of these equilibria for pools using the constant product trade function used in popular CFMMs like Uniswap. We also numerically compute the equilibria for a number of examples and discuss the effects the equilibrium fees have on capital allocation among pools. Finally, we use our framework to compute optimal fees for real world pools using past trade data.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2020

Online Graph Exploration on Trees, Unicyclic Graphs and Cactus Graphs

We study the problem of exploring all vertices of an undirected weighted graph that is initially unknown to the searcher. An edge of the graph is only revealed when the searcher visits one of its endpoints. Beginning at some start node, the searcher's goal is to visit every vertex of the graph before returning to the start node on a tour as short as possible. We prove that the Nearest Neighbor algorithm's competitive ratio on trees with $n$ vertices is $\Theta(\log n)$, i.e. no better than on general graphs. Furthermore, we examine the algorithm Blocking for a range of parameters not considered previously and prove it is 3-competitive on unicyclic graphs as well as $5/2+\sqrt{2}\approx 3.91$-competitive on cactus graphs. The best known lower bound for these two graph classes is 2.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Counting multi-quadratic number fields of bounded discriminant

We prove an asymptotic formula for the number of multi-quadratic number fields of bounded discriminant with a power-saving error term. Furthermore, we explicitly calculate the leading coefficient and extend our result to totally real multi-quadratic number fields.

math.NT↗