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Decentralized financial applications (DeFi) are a new breed of consumer-facing financial applications composed as smart contracts, deployed on permissionless blockchain technologies. In this article, we situate the DeFi concept in the theoretical context of permissionless blockchain technology and provide a taxonomical overview of agents, incentives and risks. We examine the key market categories and use-cases for DeFi applications today and identify four key risk groups for potential stakeholders contemplating the advantages of decentralized financial applications. We contribute novel insights into a rapidly emerging field, with far-reaching implications for the financial services.

The smart contract-based markets for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain have seen tremendous growth in 2021, with trading volumes peaking at 3.5b in September 2021. This dramatic surge has led to industry observers questioning the authenticity of on-chain volumes, given the absence of identity requirements and the ease with which agents can control multiple addresses. We examine potentially illicit trading patterns in the NFT markets from January 2018 to mid-November 2021, gathering data from the 52 largest collections by volume. Our findings indicate that within our sample 3.93% of addresses, processing a total of 2.04% of sale transactions, trigger suspicions of market abuse. Flagged transactions contaminate nearly all collections and may have inflated the authentic trading volumes by as much as 149,5m for the period. Most flagged transaction patterns alternate between a few addresses, indicating a predisposition for manual trading. We submit that the results presented here may serve as a viable lower bound estimate for NFT wash trading on Ethereum. Even so, we argue that wash trading may be less common than what industry observers have previously estimated. We contribute to the emerging discourse on the identification and deterrence of market abuse in the cryptocurrency markets., Comment: DeFi, Blockchain, NFT, wash trading, graph analysis Financial Cryptography & Data Security 2022 (To appear)

Automated market makers (AMM) have grown to obtain significant market share within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, resulting in a proliferation of new products pursuing exotic strategies for horizontal differentiation. Yet, their theoretical properties are curiously homogeneous when a set of basic assumptions are met. In this paper, we start by presenting a universal approach to deriving a formula for liquidity provisioning for AMMs. Next, we show that the constant function market maker and token swap market maker models are theoretically equivalent when liquidity reserves are uniform. Proceeding with an examination of AMM market microstructure, we show how the non-linear price effect translates into slippage for traders and impermanent losses for liquidity providers. We proceed by showing how impermanent losses are a function of both volatility and market depth and discuss the implications of these findings within the context of the literature.

Decentralized financial (DeFi) applications on the Ethereum blockchain are highly interoperable because they share a single state in a deterministic computational environment. Stakeholders can deposit claims on assets, referred to as ‘liquidity shares’, across applications producing effects equivalent to rehypothecation in traditional financial systems. We seek to understand the degree to which this practice may contribute to financial integration on Ethereum by examining transactions in ‘composed’ derivatives for the assets DAI, USDC, USDT, ETH and tokenized BTC for the full set of 344.8 million Ethereum transactions computed in 2020. We identify a salient trend for ‘composing’ assets in multiple sequential generations of derivatives and comment on potential systemic implications for the Ethereum network.

Decentralized financial application (DeFi) are a new type of consumer-facing financial application composed of as ‘smart contracts’ deployed on a permis- sionless blockchain. We situate the DeFi concept in the theoretical context of permissionless blockchain and provide a taxonomical overview of agents, in- centives and risks in DeFi applications. We identify four key risks with rele- vance for managers, practitioners and scholars contemplating a proactive en- gagement with decentralized financial applications. We contribute new founda- tional insights into a rapidly emerging field with far-reaching implications for consumer finance.

Recent years have seen rapid growth in IS scholarship addressing the efficacy and utility of blockchain technology in trade-processing and financial services. Numerous IS scholars encourage applied research into the ostensible synergies between the nascent technology and its various use cases. Yet the vast majority of published research approaches the issue from a purely contemplative or theoretical perspective. Addressing this gap in the IS literature, we apply the design science research methodology in the construction a software artefact for the abstract representation of physical assets in the form of blockchain tokens, a process colloquially referred to as tokenization. We present the final iteration of the artefact, evaluating our results against the requirements collected through the design search process. This informs a rigorous evaluation of the conceptual limitations of blockchain-based software artefacts. We conclude that, provided the aforementioned requirements are adequately observed within the design search process, blockchain technology can indeed improve post-trade processing.

We present a compact model for blind multiparty verification of compilation results. By employing a simple incentive scheme, we construct a mechanism, staking a deposit value on the correctness of compiled and deployed byte code. A blind committee of peers evaluate the authenticity of the deployed byte code by re-computing the task, hashing the source and target code into checksums, and submitting bids to the contract. If the evaluation round reveals inconsistencies in the checksums provided by the peers, the contract can be rejected and the deposit shared amongst contenders.