Tentative schedule

Kickoff - Álvaro Cartea

Olga Klein (Warwick Business School)

Title: Informed Liquidity Provision on Decentralized Exchanges

Discussant: Patrick Chang (University of Oxford)

Abstract: We study the role of liquidity providers (LPs) in price discovery on decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges. We find that while price discovery occurs predominantly through swaps, liquidity deposits and withdrawals also exert significant and persistent price impacts. Liquidity provision in the ETH-USDC low-fee pool close to the prevailing price has a permanent impact, consistent with informed behavior aimed at maximizing profit and mitigating adverse selection costs. We document heterogeneity across LPs, with larger orders, higher execution priority, narrower intervals, and sophisticated providers exhibiting greater informativeness. Their informational advantage arises in part from faster reactions to public information.

Andreas Park (University of Toronto)

Title: The End of the Extraordinary USD Privilege? Multi-Asset Automated Market Making for Forex

Discussant: TBD

Abstract: We study foreign exchange market design under automated market making. We compare three architectures: bilateral currency pools, a single multilateral pool, and the vehicle-currency routing structure that dominates today’s FX trading. With competitive liquidity provision, equilibrium fees trade off execution price impact against liquidity-provider losses from arbitrage. We derive closed-form conditions under which each architecture minimizes aggregate trading costs and show that cross-pair traders may prefer vehicle-currency routing even when a multilateral pool is welfare-superior—formalizing the cross-subsidy embedded in the current system. The key mechanism favoring the multilateral pool is capital multiplexing: deposits backing major pairs simultaneously provide depth on cross pairs at minimal additional cost. With many small currencies, the multilateral pool’s advantage grows provided pair-wise correlation exceeds a threshold that we characterize in closed form. We propose weighted multilateral pools as a design tool that expands the dominance region by concentrating depth on high-volume pairs. Our results apply to stablecoin-based cross-border payments and digital FX infrastructure.

Hanna Halaburda (NYU Stern)

Title: On the Impossibility of Transparent and Decentralized DeFi Trading 

Discussant: TBD

Abstract:   Permissionless blockchains promise to eliminate intermediaries by combining open participation, transparent execution, and contestable control. Control over transaction execution has nonetheless become increasingly concentrated on permissionless blockchains. In blockchains that support decentralized finance (DeFi), this concentration is economically consequential because transaction ordering directly affects trading payoffs. A small number of block producers determine transaction ordering and capture a large share of trading-related surplus, and this pattern deepens precisely as access expands and protocols adopt designs intended to make execution more competitive. 

This  outcome is not an accident of implementation or a failure of protocol design. We show that permissionless blockchains with DeFi activity endogenously centralize execution, despite transparency and regardless of protocol design. We develop a protocol-agnostic model of competition for transaction execution in which block producers---miners, validators, or builders---compete for control over block construction. When transaction ordering affects trading payoffs, execution generates extractable ordering rents. Heterogeneity in block producers' ability to capture these rents implies heterogeneous effective rewards from execution.

In equilibrium, contest-based selection sorts and amplifies these differences: block producers for whom execution is more valuable exert more effort (mining, staking or bidding), win execution more often, and become more reliable executors. Traders respond by routing transactions toward the most reliable block producers, generating coordination externalities that further concentrate execution. More decisive execution contests amplify these forces. Together, the analysis yields an impossibility result: under permissionless entry with DeFi activity, decentralized execution arises only under knife-edge conditions and is unstable to small perturbations. The findings highlight structural limits to decentralized execution in DeFi that are independent of specific protocol design choices. 

Jillian Grennan (Emory University)

Title: Holding the Bag: Depositor Reactions to a Crypto Shadow Bank Collapse 

Discussant: TBD

Abstract:  We study the collapse of Celsius, a crypto platform providing bank-like services, to examine how depositor traits shape run dynamics and their aftermath. Using individual-level transaction data from bankruptcy filings linked to blockchain addresses, we find that withdrawals were shaped not only by monitoring and information, but also by identity. Depositors from more individualistic societies exited earlier, while those from more hierarchical societies delayed and were left with stranded balances. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation from withdrawal freezes, we show that users with trapped funds reallocated toward riskier, more concentrated portfolios, consistent with gambling-for-resurrection behavior. Together, these findings point to depositor identity as an underexplored source of fragility in shadow banking. 

Ruizhe Jia (Stanford University)

Title:  The Price of Participation: How Retail Traders Lose

Discussant: TBD

Abstract: How do retail traders lose money, and who gains? Existing microstructure research cannot jointly observe retail traders, market makers, and algorithmic participants on the same venue. We introduce a classification methodology that exploits the complete, publicly recorded order flow of a fully transparent exchange to separately identify and track all three participant types across spot and derivatives markets. We decompose retail losses into execution costs, timing losses, and forced liquidations. Timing loss dominates, particularly in leveraged derivatives relative to spot. Losses concentrate among momentum-driven traders and speculative assets. Systematic back-running by algorithmic counterparties points to adverse selection as the primary mechanism.

Ciamac Moallemi (Columbia University)

Title: TBD

Discussant: TBD

Abstract: TBD

Fahad Saleh (University of Florida)

Title: Productivity Enables Security: The Economics of Blockchain Settlement

Discussant: TBD

Abstract:  Blockchain technology holds the promise of transforming our financial system but a key question lingers regarding whether this technology can ensure secure settlement. We develop an equilibrium model to study that question with regard to the most prominent blockchain type, a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain. We demonstrate that blockchain security increases with the productivity of the blockchain. Moreover, we show that there exist reasonable conditions under which a PoS blockchain is secure against arbitrarily large incentives to disrupt settlement.

Roger Wattenhofer (Anza & ETH Zurich)

Title: Solana’s Alpenglow: Faster. Fairer. Uncensored.

Abstract: 2026 promises to be a pivotal year for Solana. The Alpenglow consensus update revises core aspects of block production and finality, with implications for latency, throughput, and fault tolerance. Building on this new protocol design, Solana will then offer multiple concurrent proposers to mitigate transaction censorship and improve liveness under adversarial conditions. This talk examines the technical motivations behind these changes, their expected impact, and the economic trade-offs of evolving Solana’s architecture.

Fayçal Drissi (University of Oxford)

Title: Liquid Staking and the Limits of Policy

Discussant: TBD

Abstract: We study the role of liquid staking and how it affects the interaction between issuance policy, economic productivity, and security in proof-of-stake blockchains. In a dynamic macro-finance framework, we show that issuance redistributes resources from productive on-chain activity to validators, which effectively acts as a tax on productive capital. This mechanism generates a Laffer-curve-type tradeoff: beyond an interior optimum, higher issuance weakens the productive base that finances security and reduces staking rewards. We then introduce liquid staking, which allows users to earn staking rewards while retaining liquidity for productive use. Liquid staking collapses the traditional tradeoff between staking and DeFi. When liquid staking tokens (LSTs) closely substitute for the native asset and benefit from strategic complementarities, issuance reallocates productive activity toward LSTs, compresses the feasible policy space, and can render issuance and slashing ineffective as policy instruments.

Alfred Lehar (University of Calgary)

Title: Liquid Staking

Discussant: TBD

Abstract: Liquid staking allows agents to sell ownership of an illiquid claim to satisfy a liquidity need. We develop a model of liquid staking and characterize the effect of the secondary market on protocol stability. We establish that the liquid market has two effects: first, it allows agents to redeem illiquid assets and thus reduces run risk on the protocol, but also conveys information and can act as a coordination mechanism and increase market run risk. Using novel data on the Lido protocol, we present stylized facts on the staking market and relate our results to the design of digital deposits.

Shumiao Ouyang (University of Oxford)

Title: Soft Information, Hard Decisions: AI Advising

Discussant: Ziang Li (Imperial Business School)

Abstract:  Designing effective prompts is challenging when seeking advice from large language models (LLMs) on tasks involving users’ soft traits. We introduce preference uncertainty—capturing soft information—into a cheap talk framework (Crawford and Sobel, 1982) and model soft information communication with AI as the investor’s optimal stopping problem with Brownian information flow, which we solve in closed form. Although LLMs are not subject to misaligned incentives, soft information communication is inefficient due to inevitable losses from digitization and LLMs’ limited memory. The model predicts that an investor generally prefers LLMs trained to be more “opinionated” than her own prior, except when she is most confused and prefers an aligned and equally confused LLM. We validate model predictions through LLM-driven simulations: investor profiles are simulated based on the Survey of Consumer Finances, and multi-round LLM advising simulations, benchmarked against standard portfolio questionnaires, confirm our theoretical predictions.

Davide Crapis (Ethereum Foundation)

Title: TBD

Abstract: TBD