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Application-Controlled Sequencing (ACS) as Pigouvian Policy for MEV - Internalizing Externalities at the App Layer

Overview Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) isn’t inherently bad; the way it’s competed for is. When extractors rush, spam, and reorder to capture value, they impose costs on everyone else, worse prices for takers, adverse selection for LPs, congestion and failed transactions for bystanders, and a latency arms race that wastes real resources. A Pi...

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Deep Neural-Menu Auctions - An AI-Driven Mechanism of Blockchain Fee Markets

Abstract Blockchain transaction fee markets have long been plagued by volatile fees, rampant overpayment, and under-utilized block capacity. Legacy first-price auctions force users into a painful guessing game, while EIP-1559’s base-fee mechanism, though an improvement, introduces algorithmic oscillations and is vulnerable to miner exploits. Thi...

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Game-Theoretic Vulnerabilities in Proportional Bandwidth Allocation - A Formal Analysis of FastLane’s ShMonad Protocol

Introduction Imagine you’re running a high-frequency trading system that relies on guaranteed RPC throughput. One morning, a flash-commit bot stakes a massive amount of shMON just before the next snapshot, locks up most of the bandwidth for 10 seconds, and your trades miss the market. What happened? shMONAD is an innovative Liquid Staking Toke...

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The CLOB Wars — Monolithic vs. Modular in Next-Gen On-Chain Exchanges

In mid-2025, a widely reported nine-figure loss on Hyperliquid was read less as a failure than as a stress-test passed: a single on-chain venue absorbed institutional-scale taker flow without halting or dislocating, signaling that CEX-grade liquidity and performance had arrived on-chain. The episode—and Hyperliquid’s rapid growth that followed—e...

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Yield-Bearing Stablecoins - A Deep Dive into Mechanisms, Mathematics, and Ecosystems

WIP - WORK IN PROGRESS Overview Over the past eighteen months a new class of tokens—yield‑bearing stablecoins (YBSs)—has grown from proof‑of‑concept into a $5.8 billion funding channel for both decentralized and traditional credit markets. Unlike legacy stablecoins whose utility derives solely from price stability, YBSs attach a cash‑flow eng...

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Volume vs. Velocity - Why CME Futures Outpace High-Volume Perps in BTC Price Discovery

Cryptocurrency exchanges love to flaunt big volumes. But as every market microstructure study reminds us, what really shapes an exchange’s long‐term influence is price discovery—the capacity to incorporate fresh information faster than competitors. In the case of Bitcoin, recent evidence shows that perpetual swaps, despite high notional volumes,...

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Anatomy of a DEX Exploit - The Hyperliquid JELLY Case and Future-Proofing Perps

Introduction What happens when a single trader’s “galaxy-brain” exploit targets a decentralized exchange? On March 27, 2025, Hyperliquid found out the hard way. A manipulated short position on the JELLY token forced its USD 230 Million liquidity pool (HLP) into a USD 12 Million paper loss—nearly destabilizing the entire platform. This two-part ...

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Why "Bad" Ideas are Good for Solana - A Journey Through Transaction Prioritization

Why Explore “Bad” Ideas? In the world of high-throughput blockchain design—especially on Solana—people often focus on polished final solutions that “just work.” But that mindset can stifle creativity and blind us to alternative approaches. What if we took a fearless dive into the entire design space, including half-baked or experimental ideas? ...

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