The paper analyzes Ethereum builder transactions to show that builder centralization is an emergent property of the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) architecture, driven by specific order flow and ME…

The paper analyzes arbitrage competition on high-throughput blockchains, finding that while probabilistic search accounts for a small fraction of activity, it is disproportionately responsible for spa…

The paper revisits the source of MEV by proposing an extended discrete-time AMM model that incorporates price jumps, demonstrating that CEX-DEX arbitrage profits can match or exceed MEV, thus providin…

The paper analyzes the trade-offs in designing Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and proves a 'trilemma' theorem showing that it is impossible to simultaneously achieve incentive compatibility (IC), weak…

This paper analyzes the Solana Rug Pull ecosystem by creating a large-scale, manually verified dataset of fraudulent tokens, identifying three key behavioral patterns, and characterizing the resulting…

MEV-ACE introduces a fair ordering protocol that mitigates proposer-controlled MEV by combining authenticated economic identities, auditable commit/open messages, and verifiable delay randomness to en…

The paper demonstrates that on public blockchains, the ability to dictate transaction order (ordering power) is the true source of sanctioning power, as block producers can extract value (SE-MEV) by p…

The paper analyzes the nascent DeFi investment agent market, finding that while token valuations are high, current deployments are heterogeneous, lack clear autonomous execution, and exhibit poor risk…

The paper empirically analyzes the nascent DeFi investment agent market, finding that while token valuations are high, current deployments lack robust autonomous execution and exhibit poor risk-adjust…

The paper empirically analyzes the impact of cross-chain interoperability on DeFi lending protocols, finding that bridge volume significantly affects performance but that increased integrations can si…

This paper analyzes the x402 payment protocol, revealing systemic vulnerabilities in state synchronization and signature design that allow attackers to exploit payment systems for resource leakage in…

This paper analyzes the x402 payment protocol, revealing critical synchronization and security flaws that allow attackers to exploit payment systems and force merchants to subsidize compute costs.

The paper investigates whether tokenizing real-world assets actually improves liquidity, finding that liquidity is highly heterogeneous across asset types and is not reliably predicted by the outstand…

The paper introduces MEV non-interference, a formal security notion, to ensure that composing new smart contracts in DeFi does not increase the maximal extractable value, thereby providing a formal fo…

This paper models Ethereum's mempool as a dynamic scheduling problem using an MDP, showing that dynamic pricing stabilizes the system and maximizes long-run rewards, and that the optimal policy conver…

The paper introduces FAUDITOR, a specialized, self-learning fuzzer that detects complex Monetarily Exploitable Vulnerabilities (MEVuls) in smart contracts by integrating NLP-processed auditor knowledg…

This empirical study of Pearl's cuPOW protocol demonstrates that the network's Proof-of-Useful-Work mechanism generates zero useful AI computation, instead causing economic harm and displacing legitim…

The paper analyzes transaction fee mechanisms in modern blockchains that use parallel execution and contingency, proving an inherent trade-off between minimizing risks for users and maximizing revenue…

The paper develops and validates a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework to enhance pair trading in volatile cryptocurrency markets, demonstrating statistically significant outperformance…

The paper evaluates multi-agent LLM oracle systems for prediction market resolution, finding that independent aggregation with confidence-weighted voting significantly outperforms single-model baselin…