5 papers
SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
Sam M. Werner, Daniel Perez, Lewis Gudgeon +3
Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a blockchain powered peer-to-peer financial system, is mushrooming. Two years ago the total value locked in DeFi systems was approximately 700m USD, n…
Liquidations: DeFi on a Knife-edge
Daniel Perez, Sam M. Werner, Jiahua Xu +1
The trustless nature of permissionless blockchains renders overcollateralization a key safety component relied upon by decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Nonetheless, factors…
DeFi Protocols for Loanable Funds: Interest Rates, Liquidity and Market Efficiency
Lewis Gudgeon, Sam M. Werner, Daniel Perez +1
We coin the term *Protocols for Loanable Funds (PLFs)* to refer to protocols which establish distributed ledger-based markets for loanable funds. PLFs are emerging as one of the ma…
Unstable Throughput: When the Difficulty Algorithm Breaks
Dragos I. Ilie, Sam M. Werner, Iain Stewart +1
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in respon…
Step on the Gas? A Better Approach for Recommending the Ethereum Gas Price
Sam M. Werner, Paul J. Pritz, Daniel Perez
In the Ethereum network, miners are incentivized to include transactions in a block depending on the gas price specified by the sender. The sender of a transaction therefore faces…