IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2202.05779.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Evolution of Blockchain: from Lit to Dark

Author

Listed:
  • Agostino Capponi
  • Ruizhe Jia
  • Ye Wang

Abstract

Transactions submitted through the blockchain peer-to-peer (P2P) network may leak out exploitable information. We study the economic incentives behind the adoption of blockchain dark venues, where users' transactions are observable only by miners on these venues. We show that miners may not fully adopt dark venues to preserve rents extracted from arbitrageurs, hence creating execution risk for users. The dark venue neither eliminates frontrunning risk nor reduces transaction costs. It strictly increases the payoff of miners, weakly increases the payoff of users, and weakly reduces arbitrageurs' profits. We provide empirical support for our main implications, and show that they are economically significant. A 1% increase in the probability of being frontrun raises users' adoption rate of the dark venue by 0.6%. Arbitrageurs' cost-to-revenue ratio increases by a third with a dark venue.

Suggested Citation

  • Agostino Capponi & Ruizhe Jia & Ye Wang, 2022. "The Evolution of Blockchain: from Lit to Dark," Papers 2202.05779, arXiv.org.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2202.05779
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.05779
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Degryse, Hans & Van Achter, Mark & Wuyts, Gunther, 2009. "Dynamic order submission strategies with competition between a dealer market and a crossing network," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(3), pages 319-338, March.
    2. Lin William Cong & Zhiguo He, 2019. "Blockchain Disruption and Smart Contracts," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(5), pages 1754-1797.
    3. Tim Roughgarden, 2021. "Transaction Fee Mechanism Design," Papers 2106.01340, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2023.
    4. Julien Prat & Benjamin Walter, 2021. "An Equilibrium Model of the Market for Bitcoin Mining," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 129(8), pages 2415-2452.
    5. Eric Budish & Robin S. Lee & John J. Shim, 2024. "A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation: Will the Market Fix the Market?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 132(4), pages 1209-1246.
    6. Bruno Biais & Christophe Bisière & Matthieu Bouvard & Catherine Casamatta, 2019. "The Blockchain Folk Theorem," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(5), pages 1662-1715.
    7. David Yermack, 2017. "Corporate Governance and Blockchains," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 21(1), pages 7-31.
    8. Ioanid Roşu & Fahad Saleh, 2021. "Evolution of Shares in a Proof-of-Stake Cryptocurrency," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(2), pages 661-672, February.
    9. Buti, Sabrina & Rindi, Barbara & Werner, Ingrid M., 2017. "Dark pool trading strategies, market quality and welfare," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(2), pages 244-265.
    10. Easley, David & O'Hara, Maureen & Basu, Soumya, 2019. "From mining to markets: The evolution of bitcoin transaction fees," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(1), pages 91-109.
    11. Gur Huberman & Jacob D Leshno & Ciamac Moallemi, 2021. "Monopoly without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System [Blockchain Economics]," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 88(6), pages 3011-3040.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrea Canidio & Vincent Danos, 2024. "Commitment Against Front-Running Attacks," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 70(7), pages 4429-4440, July.
    2. Raphael Auer & Bernhard Haslhofer & Stefan Kitzler & Pietro Saggese & Friedhelm Victor, 2024. "The technology of decentralized finance (DeFi)," Digital Finance, Springer, vol. 6(1), pages 55-95, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ferreira, Daniel & Li, Jin & Nikolowa, Radoslawa, 2023. "Corporate capture of blockchain governance," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 115618, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Yuxuan Lu & Qian Qi & Xi Chen, 2023. "A Framework of Transaction Packaging in High-throughput Blockchains," Papers 2301.10944, arXiv.org.
    3. Alon Benhaim & Brett Hemenway Falk & Gerry Tsoukalas, 2021. "Scaling Blockchains: Can Committee-Based Consensus Help?," Papers 2110.08673, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
    4. Lin William Cong & Ke Tang & Yanxin Wang & Xi Zhao, 2023. "Inclusion and Democratization Through Web3 and DeFi? Initial Evidence from the Ethereum Ecosystem," NBER Working Papers 30949, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Lin William Cong & Zhiguo He & Jiasun Li & Wei Jiang, 2021. "Decentralized Mining in Centralized Pools [Concentrating on the fall of the labor share]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(3), pages 1191-1235.
    6. Joseph Abadi & Markus Brunnermeier, 2018. "Blockchain Economics," NBER Working Papers 25407, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Jacob D. Leshno & Elaine Shi & Rafael Pass, 2024. "On the Viability of Open-Source Financial Rails: Economic Security of Permissionless Consensus," Papers 2409.08951, arXiv.org.
    8. Barros, Fernando & Bertolai, Jefferson & Carrijo, Matheus, 2023. "Cryptocurrency is accounting coordination: Selfish mining and double spending in a simple mining game," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 25-50.
    9. Max Raskin & Fahad Saleh & David Yermack, 2020. "How do Private Digital Currencies Affect Government Policy?," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Bernard Yeung (ed.), DIGITAL CURRENCY ECONOMICS AND POLICY, chapter 12, pages 111-115, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    10. Garud Iyengar & Fahad Saleh & Jay Sethuraman & Wenjun Wang, 2023. "Economics of Permissioned Blockchain Adoption," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(6), pages 3415-3436, June.
    11. Michael Sockin & Wei Xiong, 2023. "Decentralization through Tokenization," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 78(1), pages 247-299, February.
    12. Gilles Hilary & Laura Xiaolei Liu, 2021. "Blockchain and Other Distributed Ledger Technologies in Finance," Springer Books, in: Raghavendra Rau & Robert Wardrop & Luigi Zingales (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Technological Finance, pages 243-268, Springer.
    13. Ye Li & Simon Mayer & Simon Mayer, 2021. "Money Creation in Decentralized Finance: A Dynamic Model of Stablecoin and Crypto Shadow Banking," CESifo Working Paper Series 9260, CESifo.
    14. Prateek Saxena, 2020. "Comments on “Cellular Structure for a Digital Fiat Currency” — Cellular DFC Design: Technological Perspectives," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Bernard Yeung (ed.), DIGITAL CURRENCY ECONOMICS AND POLICY, chapter 11, pages 103-109, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    15. Bonaparte, Yosef, 2022. "Time horizon and cryptocurrency ownership: Is crypto not speculative?," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    16. Igor Makarov & Antoinette Schoar, 2021. "Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market," NBER Working Papers 29396, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Walker, Clive B., 2024. "Going mainstream: Cryptocurrency narratives in newspapers," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    18. Cole, Benjamin M. & Dyhrberg, Anne H. & Foley, Sean & Svec, Jiri, 2022. "Can Bitcoin be Trusted? Quantifying the economic value of blockchain transactions," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    19. Bonaparte, Yosef & Bernile, Gennaro, 2023. "A new “Wall Street Darling?” effects of regulation sentiment in cryptocurrency markets," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    20. Makarov, Igor & Schoar, Antoinette, 2021. "Blockchain analysis of the Bitcoin market," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118897, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2202.05779. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.