Automated market maker (AMM) fee rules are often evaluated by liquidity-provider (LP) welfare, but that objective mixes fee revenue, adverse-selection loss (loss-versus-rebalancing, LVR), routing response, and liquidity supply. Fixed-fee Uniswap v3 history cannot separate these channels or identify counterfactual trader-facing dynamic-fee rules. Real fee-related variation nonetheless exists: the Uniswap protocol-fee switch cut LP take-rates with tier-differentiated intensity while leaving trader-facing fees unchanged. Using a pre-specified matched-overlap event-study difference-in-differences design, we estimate the liquidity-supply response to take-rate cuts, the kernel K_L that simulator-based fee-controller evaluations routinely freeze, while reconstructing treatment, event time, unit roles, and outcomes from public logs into a frozen, hash-checked panel before any estimate. We detect no large short-run average response in active liquidity or local depth; LP participation and composition, more precisely estimated, likewise show none, so the result is a non-detection at the design's resolution rather than a precise zero. Token-1 volume and native fee income fail the parallel-trends gate and are reported descriptively. A channel-admissibility audit delimits the estimand: the LP-side response K_L is design-based, while trader-facing dynamic-fee protection is a model-conditioned boundary, not a second estimand.
Intent-based decentralized exchanges delegate execution to a competitive class of agents -- solvers -- whose behavior is shaped by protocol-designed reward rules. We measure how a change to those rules reshapes who captures value, using a governance-dated natural experiment: CoW Protocol CIP-74 (effective 8 December 2025), which replaced a fixed solver-reward cap with one tied to protocol revenue and introduced an ad-valorem volume fee. Using daily solver shares over 395 days, we find the reform reallocated trading value by order size. The robust signature is a monotone size gradient: concentration fell in small orders and rose in large ones across four order-value buckets (Spearman rho=1.00, exact permutation p=0.042) -- a pattern that survives dropping the single largest solver. Aggregate concentration also rose (volume-weighted HHI 0.176->0.241), substantially carried by the incumbent top solver. By trade count the market de-concentrated (count-HHI -0.060). A simple solver-economics model rationalizes the pattern: an ad-valorem fee is competitively neutral, while a revenue-linked reward cap raises the marginal payoff to inventory-rich solvers on large orders -- consistent with restricted-entry predictions (Chitra et al. 2024). A control venue (UniswapX) shows no matching break. We detect no change in average execution quality (~7 bps bound). A triple-difference exploiting a February 2026 fee cut is directionally consistent but underpowered. Reward design measurably reallocates who captures value in intent markets, without moving the average price users receive.
The Reverse Kelly Automated Market Maker (rkAMM) is introduced, the core engine of the proposed lending framework for decentralized credit and provides the foundational financial engineering required to bridge the 2 trillion global supply chain finance gap using permissionless blockchain infrastructure.
Sai Srikanth Madugula, Peplluis Esteva de la Rosa, Daya Shankar· 0 citations
The framework of loss-versus-rebalancing (LVR) is used to study how the total worst-case loss to the subsidizer is distributed across price states or over time and extended to dynamic liquidity management, showing that liquidity levels can be adjusted over time to implement a prescribed target expected cumulative loss schedule.
C. Moallemi, D. Robinson, Brian Z. Zhu· 0 citations
Automated market makers (AMMs) are typically interpreted and evaluated as decentralized exchanges. Herein, we take the perspective envisioned by Balancer that an AMM can also be viewed as a portfolio technology that programmatically enforces an economic mandate. In particular, we follow the geometric mean market maker (G3M) invariant employed by that protocol in order to enforce a target-weighted portfolio. We introduce a multi-asset fee structure to the G3M under which competitive arbitrage implements a band-rebalancing strategy with mis-weighting bounded ex ante, allowing compliance with the mandate to be verified directly from the pool's observable holdings. We then compare simulated G3M portfolios against the realized performance of VBIAX, EQL, and EDOW on annualized returns and tracking error against the portfolio mandate. Across these historical case studies, and using arbitrage-only order flow, the G3M is found to outperform the incumbent funds in both metrics for certain fee ranges.
Zachary Feinstein, I. Florescu, Sean O'Leary· 0 citations
A physically backed leveraged event position requires real credit: if collateral C receives leverage L, the protocol supplies (L-1)C and uses the combined amount to acquire recognized event exposure. This paper develops a venue-agnostic on-chain credit architecture for that capital layer and an endogenous model of its capital market. It separates traders, Senior Credit LPs, market makers, liquidators, and Liquidation Backstop Providers; formalizes pool and debt shares, utilization- and risk-sensitive interest, collateral-locked position accounts, venue capabilities, market-maker commitments, withdrawal queues, isolated pools, non-redeemable reserves, and a deterministic loss waterfall; and models endogenous provider participation, leverage demand, liquidity withdrawal, liquidator entry, reserve replenishment, runs, and common-factor contagion. Formal results establish balanced real- and integer-unit accounting, settlement-confirmed debt priority, trader residual ownership, idempotent partial settlement, non-dilutive share issuance, junior-before-Senior impairment, loss-participating withdrawal queues, utilization-equilibrium conditions, and loss-allocation and contagion bounds. The release preserves 28 exact fixtures and 31,082 deterministic checks and adds fixed-seed agent-based experiments with 70,207,488 scalar invariant evaluations and zero failures. The experiments show that layered protection reduces but does not eliminate Senior loss, that 5x leverage materially increases capital pressure, and that market-maker capacity can raise aggregate shortfall if admission expands too quickly. Results are synthetic mechanism comparisons under author-specified behavior, not forecasts of APY, defaults, venue liquidity, or production safety.
Decentralized lending lacks a credit bureau: a borrower's capacity to repay must be inferred entirely from public on-chain activity, without income verification or a liability record. This paper presents zLend, a deployed cash-flow underwriting framework that reconstructs a wallet's daily balance history from raw token transfers and derives short-duration repayment-capacity signals from it. The reconstruction is performed twice per wallet, once restricted to a fixed stablecoin basket and once over all fungible transfers, on the premise that a wallet's total token holdings and its liquid, spendable balance are distinct quantities whose conflation misprices risk. From each series we derive liquidity coverage against a fixed loan size, cash-flow volatility and regularity, a drawdown-and-recovery statistic adapted from quantitative finance, and a recurring-counterparty detector that identifies salary-like payment cadence from transfer timing alone. The two views are then compared: a wallet with large aggregate holdings whose stablecoin reserve rarely covers the loan size is flagged as a liquidity mismatch irrespective of total wealth. We specify the pipeline formally, document the golden-master methodology used to verify a cross-language production migration to numerical tolerance 1e-9, and characterize the tier function's parameter sensitivity with an independent reimplementation validated to exact agreement (78 of 78 field assertions) against the deployed system's reference fixtures. Tier assignment is governed predominantly by the reference loan size, with four of six reference wallets changing tier across loan sizes from USD 10 to USD 25,000; the drawdown and coverage criteria bind on disjoint wallets, so neither subsumes the other; and no criterion in the tier rule is inert. zLend is deployed in production, informing real lending decisions via third-party API integrations.
AI Zeru, G. Girish, Ashutosh Sahoo et al.· 0 citations