加密货币背后的经济学

… ten years, nevertheless, the knowledge about its economic and business implications is still … The first is an analysis of the shift from economics to tokenomics highlighting the central role …

Traditional two-sided platforms (e.g., Amazon, Uber) rely primarily on commission contracts to generate revenues and fuel growth, whereas their decentralized counterparts (e.g., Uniswap, Filecoin) often forego these in favor of token retention. What economics underpin this choice? We show that with properly designed initial coin offerings (ICOs), both mechanisms can independently alleviate market failures at the initial fundraising stage and incentivize long-term platform building. However, they achieve this in different ways. Although commission contracts often lead to higher profits for founders, token retention leads to higher service levels, benefiting the users and service providers. In essence, token retention surrenders a fraction of earnings to better align with the tenets of decentralized governance. Combining both mechanisms can add value, but only in relatively limited cases. These findings offer guidance and a possible rationale for why platforms may want to favor one mechanism over the other or use both. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, Special Issue of Management Science: Blockchains and crypto economics. Funding: This work is funded by the Mack Institute at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02076 .

In a token offering, investors fund a venture in exchange for tokens that grant rights to future economic output. To many financial industry insiders, tokens have no intrinsic merit and exist only as a way to evade regulations. We demonstrate that generic revenue-based token contracts are indeed economically inferior to equity and lead to over- or underproduction. However, an optimally designed token contract, which is a combination of an output presale and an incremental revenue-sharing agreement, yields the same payoffs as equity and debt. Moreover, with entrepreneurial moral hazard, tokens can finance a strictly larger set of ventures than equity. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, Special Section of Management Science: Blockchains and Crypto Economics. Funding: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Canadian Securities Institute Research Foundation [Grants 20013075 and 435-2017-064]. Financial support from the Global Risk Institute and the Mackenzie Investment Chair in Evidence-Based Decision Making is also acknowledged.

… The blockchain technology rises to this challenge by allowing the creation of crypto-tokens as … Then, given the economic cost of buying back tokens, χ, we characterize the incentive for …

… designs provide smaller or larger incentives in order to join … also introduced the decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin [12, … theory, mechanism design, and monetary economics [50]. It is …

Digital tokens linked to financial and economic ventures may have multiple functions and uses. In this work, we examine the relationship between various token functions and the market …

: As cryptocurrency markets continue to captivate attention promising quick financial gains, it becomes increasingly important to critically examine blockchain-based projects that attract significant investments. This study provides insights into evaluating the viability of projects by analyzing and categorizing token attributes through the application of a token morphological framework. This serves as a structured examination of key parameters - purpose, governance, functional, and technical - to understand how different design aspects interact within each project and influence long-term success. We explore sustainability-oriented projects within the field of Regenerative Finance (ReFi) being a growing dimension of blockchain innovation that integrates financial systems with ecological and social regeneration. The focused approach of limiting the scope to three case studies ensures a deeper analysis and provides clarity in understanding the nuances of token design while also identifying possible patterns across projects. Hence, we define token archetypes offering valuable insights into how variations in token structure influence governance, user incentives, and economic viability, extending micro-level perspective to broader economic dynamics. This study sheds light on ownership and governance structures, token supply models, mechanisms for incentivizing participation while limiting and mitigating speculative behavior, and mechanisms for token removal from circulations. Understanding these aspects allow for shaping more impactful and resilient token economies and provides actionable insights that can inform future projects, making it relevant for both academic and practical implications. This comparative analysis contributes to the theoretical development of tokenomics by offering a clearer understanding of how different token structures align with organizational goals and community dynamics. In doing so, it bridges theoretical insights with practical applications.

The evolving nature of scientific ecosystems demands incentive systems that can fairly and adaptively accommodate diverse forms of research contributions. Traditional reward mechanisms, which are often static and centralised, tend to overlook non-publication activities such as peer review and data sharing. In response to this challenge, this study proposes a blockchain-based scientific incentive system using a Dynamic Smart Contract approach that enables administrators to update reward policies directly without requiring contract redeployment. The system is designed with a modular architecture and integrates a key-value store to support flexible and sustainable scientific reputation tokenisation. The model is implemented using a set of simulated Ethereum smart contracts, including a separate reward policy contract and keyvalue configuration logic, without actual on-chain deployment. The system is evaluated through a two-phase conceptual simulation involving changes in reward weightings while keeping the contribution data constant. The assessment focuses on three key aspects: adaptability, fairness, and stability. The results show that the system can adjust to policy changes in real time, shifting the dominant reward from publication (526.3 tokens) to peer review (580.6 tokens) after policy revision. It maintains fairness with a Gini Index of 0.156 and demonstrates structural consistency, with total token issuance increasing from 1000 to 1999.99 without duplication or inflation. These findings indicate that the proposed dynamic contract model offers a viable foundation for developing more inclusive, transparent, and context-responsive scientific reputation systems, particularly within the emerging framework of decentralised science.

Multi-sided platforms are omnipresent in today’s digital world. However, establishing a platform includes challenges: The platform utility usually increases with the number of participants. At an early stage, potential participants expect the platform utility to be low and lack an incentive to join (i.e., “chicken and egg” problem). Blockchain-enabled utility tokens hold the promise to overcome this problem. They supposedly provide a suitable financial incentive for their owners to join the platform as soon as possible. In the first half of 2018, investors seemed to believe in the presumption and spent more than US$ 17.6 billion in token sales. To date, we know little about this financial incentive in the context of the token economy. For this purpose, we model the token value development and the associated incentives in a multi-sided blockchain-enabled platform. The resulting findings suggest that blockchain-enabled utility tokens can help to overcome the “chicken and egg” problem. However, these tokens lead to contradictory incentives for platform participants, and can even inhibit platform usage. The contribution of our work is twofold: First, we develop one of the first models for token value development. Second, our research contributes to a deeper understanding of the utility token’s financial incentive.

We explain the mechanics of smart contracts. We then highlight the benefits of smart contracts, such as overcoming commitment problems. We also discuss limitations, such as the difficulty for smart contracts to access information external to the blockchain and the difficulty of integrating smart contract code with traditional legal enforcement. We further highlight how the absence of a trusted intermediary inflates implementation costs for blockchain applications. We conclude with a discussion of the most prominent smart contract applications in decentralized finance: token issuance (e.g., initial coin offerings, nonfungible tokens), decentralized exchanges, and protocols for loanable funds. Our survey covers both institutional details and relevant literature. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Financial Economics, Volume 15 is November 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

… decentralized finance (DeFi), emphasizing how protocol design and incentive structures shape economic … We review evidence on tokens, decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, …

ABSTRACT We examine decentralization of digital platforms through tokenization as an innovation to resolve the conflict between platforms and users. By delegating control to users, tokenization through utility tokens acts as a commitment device that prevents a platform from exploiting users. This commitment comes at the cost of not having an owner with an equity stake who, in conventional platforms, would subsidize participation to maximize the platform's network effect. This trade‐off makes utility tokens a more appealing funding scheme than equity for platforms with weak fundamentals. The conflict reappears when nonusers, such as token investors and validators, participate on the platform.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a blockchain powered peer-to-peer financial system, is mushrooming. Two years ago the total value locked in DeFi systems was approximately 700m USD, now, as of April 2022, it stands at around 150bn USD. The frenetic evolution of the ecosystem has created challenges in understanding the basic principles of these systems and their security risks. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) we delineate the DeFi ecosystem along the following axes: its primitives, its operational protocol types and its security. We provide a distinction between technical security, which has a healthy literature, and economic security, which is largely unexplored, connecting the latter with new models and thereby synthesizing insights from computer science, economics and finance. Finally, we outline the open research challenges in the ecosystem across these security types.

… This paper examines the efficiency of the Initial Coin Offering (ICO… At the same time, crypto funds extract sizable economic rents … in ICOs because they have an incentive and the ability to …

… on the embedded economic mechanisms and incentives that … since there are strong implicit incentives for validators to pool … tokens and coins (here we collectively refer to them as tokens…

… This paper examines the efficiency of the Initial Coin Offering (ICO… At the same time, crypto funds extract sizable economic rents … in ICOs because they have an incentive and the ability to …

… of new tokens at the early stages of a new DApp, as in initial coin … of decentralized decision-making in the real economy as well. … Incentive problems arise in financial markets …

The future of the internet is moving toward decentralization, with decentralized networks and blockchain technology playing essential roles in different sectors. Decentralized networks offer equality, accessibility, and security at a societal level, while blockchain technology guarantees security, authentication, and openness. Integrating blockchain technology with decentralized characteristics has become increasingly significant in finance; we call this “decentralized finance” (DeFi). As of January 2023, the DeFi crypto market capitalized USD 46.21 billion and served over 6.6 million users. As DeFi continues to outperform traditional finance (TradFi), it provides reduced fees, increased inclusivity, faster transactions, enhanced security, and improved accessibility, transparency, and programmability; it also eliminates intermediaries. For end users, DeFi presents asset custody options, peer-to-peer transactions, programmable control features, and innovative financial solutions. Despite its rapid growth in recent years, there is limited comprehensive research on mapping DeFi’s benefits and risks alongside its role as an enabling technology within the financial services sector. This research addresses these gaps by developing a DeFi classification system, organizing information, and clarifying connections among its various aspects. The research goal is to improve the understanding of DeFi in both academic and industrial circles to promote comprehension of DeFi taxonomy. This well-organized DeFi taxonomy aids experts, regulators, and decision-makers in making informed and strategic decisions, thereby fostering responsible integration into TradFi for effective risk management. This study enhances DeFi security by providing users with clear guidance on existing mechanisms and risks in DeFi, reducing susceptibility to misinformation, and promoting secure participation. Additionally, it offers an overview of DeFi’s role in shaping the future of the internet.

… token standards, decentralized exchanges, decentralized debt … these organizations with an economics or legal background … The constant product model creates the incentives for a semi-…

Abstract As the underlying technology of bitcoin, blockchain is expected to create a new economic system by revolutionizing the way we communicate over the internet. Blockchain seeks to improve information security and transparency by sharing encrypted data among peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Due to its emphasis on security and trust, there is increased demand for blockchain’s application in a variety of business sectors. The decentralized nature of blockchain creates the new concept of a token economy in which the community’s revenue can be allocated to the actual content producers and service users who create value. This article looks at how blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are evolving and interconnected, creating a token economy through different business models. Blockchain is expected to be a key technology that enables new protocols for the establishment of a token economy in the future, leading to a new economic paradigm.

… blockchain integration affects money supply composition across economies. Results reveal a significant correlation between blockchain adoption and monetary … , inflation dynamics, and …

Purpose The development of blockchain and cryptocurrency may alleviate the economic strain associated with recession. Economic recessions tend to be aggregate-demand driven, meaning that they are caused by fluctuations in the supply of or demand for money. Holding monetary policy as solution assumes that stability must arise from outside of the economic system. Under a policy regime that allows innovations in blockchain to develop, blockchain technology may promote a money supply that is responsive to changes in demand to hold money. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that cryptocurrencies present an opportunity to profitably implement rules that promote macroeconomic stability. In particular, cryptocurrency that is asset-backed may provide a means for cheaply attaining liquidity during a crisis. Design/methodology/approach The role of cryptocurrency in promoting macroeconomic equilibrium is approached through the lens of monetary theory. Moves away from macroeconomic equilibrium necessitate either a change in the average price of money or a change in the quantity of money, or a change in portfolio demand for money. Cryptocurrency promotes an increase, however this requires the alignment of policy regulating the use of cryptocurrency, reduction in taxes placed on the use of cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency protocol. Findings Cryptocurrency is unlikely to become legal tender, but it may alleviate macroeconomic fluctuations as a near money that provides liquidity and whose supply is sensitive to changes in demand to hold money and money-like substitutes. This role might be inhibited if policy stifles the development of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Research limitations/implications New financial innovations like cryptocurrencies can be analyzed applying the equation of exchange in light of the mechanics of money creation under conditions of disequilibrium. Monetary disequilibrium may be promoted by policy that causes bottlenecks in financial markets. Originality/value Theory of monetary disequilibrium has broad implications for the development and regulation of financial markets. This theory has not been applied to the development of cryptocurrency markets.

… by factors such as monetary policy, supply-demand imbalances, and inflation expectations, … might be proprietary or delayed, public blockchain transactions are openly visible to anyone …

… on how tightening US policy reduces the supply of bank loans … Given the impact of the US monetary policy on the market, … and spending, curbing inflationary pressures, while a lower …

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

… noted that the Blockchain-based financial infrastructure is … money supply and short-term interest rates on real output, … ’s persistence in the tight monetary policy against rising inflation …

This paper explores the theoretical challenges posed by cryptocurrencies to central bank monetary supply management. With the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, traditional monetary systems and financial regulatory frameworks face unprecedented disruptions. Through literature review and theoretical analysis, this study systematically examines the fundamental characteristics and operational mechanisms of cryptocurrencies, and their potential impact on monetary policy. The analysis delves into the decentralization of cryptocurrencies and its challenge to the central bank's monopoly on currency issuance. Additionally, it evaluates how the anonymity and cross-border liquidity of cryptocurrencies disrupt monetary policy transmission, particularly in controlling money supply and interest rates. The study also reviews the regulatory policies of various countries and regions, assessing their effectiveness and limitations. The conclusion highlights that cryptocurrency present multifaceted challenges to central bank monetary supply management, affecting the efficacy of monetary policy, financial stability, and the adaptability of regulatory frameworks. To address these challenges, central banks must innovate in policy tools and regulatory measures, and enhance international cooperation to manage cross-border financial risks posed by cryptocurrencies. This research provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the impact of cryptocurrencies on traditional monetary systems and offers valuable insights for policymakers.

The following sections are included:IntroductionTransactions Technology and MoneyCan Cryptocurrencies be a Viable Competitor in the Money Industry?Currency Substitutes and the Central BankHow Will We Know that Cryptocurrencies Have Arrived?Cryptocurrency: Is It a Threat to the Federal Reserve’s Money Monopoly?Conclusion

… This paper examines the economic mechanism of cryptocurrency mining. By presenting a … by passive miners. We use these results to introduce a formulation of the price elasticity of …

We assess how the cost structure of cryptocurrency mining affects the response of miners to exchange rate fluctuations and the immutability of cryptocurrency ledgers that rely on proof-of-work. We show that the amount of mining power supplied to currencies that rely on specialized hardware, such as Bitcoin, responds less to adverse exchange rate shocks than other currencies respond to such shocks, a fact that is instrumental to avoiding double-spending attacks. The results may change if mining equipment used for one cryptocurrency can be transferred to another. For smaller currencies with low exchange rate correlation, transferability eliminates the protection that fixed costs provide. Our results weaken doomsday predictions for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with declining block rewards. This paper was accepted by Bruno Biais, Special Section of Management Science: Blockchains and Crypto Economics. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4901 .

The Bitcoin protocol induces miners, through monetary rewards, to expend energy in order to add blocks to the chain. We show that, when energy costs are substantial and taken into account, counterintuitive and unintended strategic behavior results: In a simple bounded-horizon setting with two identical miners there is a unique pure symmetric equilibrium in which both miners first "slow down" in order to decrease the crypto complexity and then take advantage of this decrease. If miners have different energy efficiencies and are restricted to choose the same hash rate for many epochs, there is a unique pure equilibrium in which miners either participate at low levels that depend in intricate ways on all the other miners' efficiencies, or choose to abstain from mining if their efficiency is too low. In the general setting in which miners can adapt their hash rates over time, we show that, unless the number of miners is very small, the only possible pure equilibria are rather chaotic, with miners quitting and starting again periodically --- or there is no pure equilibrium at all. We discuss the implications of these results for the stability of proof-of-work protocols.

We investigate the impact of exogenous shocks on network and stability parameters in proof-of-work-based permissionless blockchains with concentrated mining ecosystems, such as the Bitcoin network. Intuitively, declining hashing power due to a shock should weaken the network by lowering the costs of an attack. We demonstrate that parallel movement of important covariates (such as the coin price) can offset this effect and keep the mining process incentive compatible. Building on a theoretical framework developed by Budish (2018) and Capponi et al. (2021) to formally describe the proof-of-work consensus design, we examine two exogenous shocks to the Chinese Bitcoin mining ecosystem to provide empirical evidence for our hypotheses. The shocks were caused by the Corona pandemic in October 2020 and grid disruptions in April 2021, respectively. Our results show i) the key structural parameters affecting the robustness of the consensus design against exogenous shocks, and ii) how market participants incorporate and value variations in the implied stability of the distributed ledger.

… prices and output volume had a positive impact on miners’ scales. An increase in bitcoin price leads to a 0.297% increase in individual miners’ … consequence of economic incentives, …

In Proof-of-Work Blockchain-based systems, the ledger is kept consistent through some participants solving cryptopuzzles, usually referred to as block mining. Conventional wisdom asserts that the mining protocol is incentive-compatible. However, whether some strategic mining behaviors occur in practice or not, has been the subject of extensive debate. In this paper, we target this question by detecting anomalies in the statistics of consecutive blocks among several popular cryptocurrency systems. Firstly, we measure the inequality of mining revenue distribution in each system. Secondly, we propose a statistical method to identify the selfish mining (SM) behavior, a mining attack strategy posited by Eyal and Sirer in 2014. Our method is based on abnormal (statistically significant) high probability of continuously mining blocks. Finally, we extend our method to detect the mining cartels, in which miners secretly get together and share information about newly mined blocks. Our analysis will contribute to the research of fairness in cryptocurrency mining by providing evidence that the aforementioned strategic mining behaviors do take place in practice.

The process of mining blocks on a blockchain utilizing a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism carries inherent risks, particularly when the operational expenses associated with mining exceed the rewards earned. Building on previous findings on mining in pools, this paper delves into the question of whether the theoretical formulas for the ruin probability and the expected value of future surplus obtained under particular model assumptions are indeed validated empirically. In particular, we include the presence of transactions fees in the block rewards in our analysis. We also provide algorithms to fit the involved generalized hyperexponential distributions to actual data. Moreover, we perform a sensitivity analysis for different factors of interest, and we quantify the relevance of incorporating temporal dependence and transaction fees in the model.

Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven by the desire to use the blockchain itself as a source of pseudorandomness. We consider instead a longest-chain Proof-of-Stake protocol with perfect, trusted, external randomness (e.g. a randomness beacon). We produce two main results. First, we show that a strategic miner can strictly outperform an honest miner with just 32.8% of the total stake. Note that a miner of this size cannot outperform an honest miner in the Proof-of-Work model. This establishes that even with access to a perfect randomness beacon, incentives in Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake longest-chain protocols are fundamentally different. Second, we prove that a strategic miner cannot outperform an honest miner with 30.8% of the total stake. This means that, while not quite as secure as the Proof-of-Work regime, desirable incentive properties of Proof-of-Work longest-chain protocols can be approximately recovered via Proof-of-Stake with a perfect randomness beacon. The space of possible strategies in a Proof-of-Stake mining game is significantly richer than in a Proof-of-Work game. Our main technical contribution is a characterization of potentially optimal strategies for a strategic miner, and in particular a proof that the corresponding infinite-state MDP admits an optimal strategy that is positive recurrent.

… is that validators receive a portion of transaction fees as a … finalization alone for transaction confirmation: block proposal … A principled economic analysis of the interplay of incentives …

Permissionless blockchains require a protocol to generate consensus. Many prominent permissionless blockchains employ Proof-of-Work (PoW) for that purpose, but PoW possesses significant shortcomings. Various alternatives have been proposed. This paper provides the first formal economic model of the most famous alternative, Proof-of-Stake (PoS), and establishes conditions under which PoS generates consensus. A sufficiently modest reward schedule not only implies the existence of an equilibrium in which consensus obtains as soon as possible but also precludes a persistent forking equilibrium. The latter result arises because PoS, unlike PoW, requires that validators are also stakeholders.

The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions ("one unit of computation, one vote''). This leads to enormous expenditure on hardware and electricity in order to collect the rewards associated with transaction authorization. Proof-of-Stake is an alternative concept that instead selects users to authorize transactions proportional to their wealth ("one coin, one vote"). Some aspects of the two paradigms are the same. For instance, obtaining voting power in Proof-of-Stake has a monetary cost just as in Proof-of-Work: a coin cannot be freely duplicated any more easily than a unit of computation. However some aspects are fundamentally different. In particular, exactly because Proof-of-Stake is wasteless, there is no inherent resource cost to deviating (commonly referred to as the "Nothing-at-Stake'' problem). In contrast to prior work, we focus on incentive-driven deviations (any participant will deviate if doing so yields higher revenue) instead of adversarial corruption (an adversary may take over a significant fraction of the network, but the remaining players follow the protocol). The main results of this paper are several formal barriers to designing incentive-compatible proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies (that don't apply to proof-of-work).

… we show that it is incentive-compatible with the underlying … The cost defines the economic price that a participant in the … of transactions and describe how to validate each of them [9]. …

… of the system’s economy, influencing participant incentives and ultimately determining the … incentive to choose the validator with higher reward rate for stakers, r(v)t. These incentives …

… two PoS protocols that allow validators to generate at most … consensus process is instant and results in negligible costs. … generating one signature, validators have incentive to work on …

In proof-of-stake based consortium blockchain networks, pre-selected miners compete to solve a crypto-puzzle with a successfully mining probability proportional to the amount of their stakes. When the puzzle is solved, the miners are encouraged to take part in mined block propagation for verification to win a transaction fee from the blockchain user. The mined block should be propagated over wired or wireless networks, and be verified as quickly as possible to decrease consensus propagation delay. In this letter, we study incentivizing the consensus propagation considering the tradeoff between the network delay of block propagation process and offered transaction fee from the blockchain user. A Stackelberg game is then formulated to jointly maximize utility of the blockchain user and individual profit of the miners. The blockchain user acting as the leader sets the transaction fee for block verification. The miners acting as the followers decide on the number of recruited verifiers over wired or wireless networks. We apply the backward induction to analyze the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium. Performance evaluation validates the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed game model in consensus propagation.

… While PoW prioritises open participation at the cost of … incentives, PoS secures the network through economic stake rather … through transparent validator disclosure, incentives for staking …

… In PoS, validators stake their coins which serves as an economic incentive to act in the … Here we focus on the role of security of stake from attack and commission rate. We considered …

In the digital economy era, the development of a distributed robust economy system has become increasingly important. The blockchain technology can be used to build such a system, but current mainstream consensus protocols are vulnerable to attack, making blockchain systems unsustainable. In this paper, we propose a new Robust Proof of Stake (RPoS) consensus protocol, which uses the amount of coins to select miners and limits the maximum value of the coin age to effectively avoid coin age accumulation attack and Nothing-at-Stake (N@S) attack. Under a comparison framework, we show that the RPoS equals or outperforms Proof of Work (PoW) protocol and Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol in three dimensions: energy consumption, robustness, and transaction processing speed. To compare the three consensus protocols in terms of trade efficiency, we built an agent-based model and find that RPoS protocol has greater or similar trade request-satisfied ratio than PoW and PoS. Hence, we suggest that RPoS is very suitable for building a robust digital economy distributed system.

… concepts on blockchain as a decentralized consensus and its … Network security in the blockchain setting can be viewed as … Most studies hint at cryptocurrency price and mining cost as …

This paper shows that in order to account for significant value-at-risk scenarios, it is only possible to establish a Blockchain protocol as a truly secure, decentralised and automated trust provider with the significant security guarantees provided through inherent economically incentivised consensus mechanisms that are built on top of cryptographic guarantees. This is relevant for all industries but in particular for capital markets, as the inherent conflict of interest of banks running Blockchain/distributed ledger technology (DLT) network nodes for scenarios such as security exchanges necessitates the use of third party Blockchain/DLT node providers. This in turn requires higher security guarantees since these third party providers are inherently less trusted by the ecosystem participants than the banks themselves, at least in principle, which requires even more security guarantees as the value-at-risk for third party operated Blockchain/DLT network rapidly increases over the medium term as Blockchain/DLT adoption picks up.

This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated that an economically sustainable network will involve the same cost regardless of whether it is proof of work or proof of stake although in the later the cost will take the form of illiquid financial resources. In addition, it is shown that regulating the number of nodes (as in a permissioned network) does not lead to additional cost savings that cannot otherwise be achieved via a setting of block rewards in a permissionless (i.e., free entry) network. This suggests that permissioned networks will not be able to economize on costs relative to permissionless networks.

This paper examines the economic implications of scaling blockchains under two different consensus protocols: Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). We study an economic model whereby agents can store wealth through the blockchain’s cryptocurrency but may face a costly delay when liquidating due to the blockchain’s finite transaction rate. Agents may expedite processing by paying fees to the blockchain’s validators. Within such a model, we study the ability of a malicious agent to compromise the security of the blockchain. We show how improved scaling alleviates congestion, leading to a decrease in equilibrium fees. Under a PoW protocol, this leads validators to earn lower fees and thus spend less on computational power. This reduced computational power then lowers the cost of a successful attack and therefore the security of the PoW blockchain. Scaling has the opposite effect for the PoS protocol as alleviating congestion increases the demand and therefore the market value of the blockchain’s cryptocurrency. That increased market value increases the cost of acquiring enough cryptocurrency necessary for a successful attack and thereby improves PoS blockchain security. al. and Easley Huberman et al. Prat and (2019), and Capponi Cong et Garratt and van Oordt (2020), Hinzen et al. (2020), Lehar and Parlour (2020), and Pagnotta (2020), our work provides insights regarding PoW blockchains. Akin to Fanti et al. (2019), Rosu and Saleh (2020) and Saleh (2020), we also provide insights regarding blockchains. Unlike the various papers, we study the economic implications of

Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks. However, this procedure can still lead to potential attacks that make consensus harder to achieve or lead to coordination issues if multiple, competing chains (i.e., forks) are created with the potential that an untruthful fork might be selected. We explore the potential for mechanisms to be used to achieve consensus that are triggered when there is a dispute impeding consensus. Using the feature that nodes stake tokens in proof of stake (POS) protocols, we construct revelation mechanisms in which the unique (subgame perfect) equilibrium involves validating nodes propose truthful blocks using only the information that exists amongst all nodes. We construct operationally and computationally simple mechanisms under both Byzantine Fault Tolerance and a Longest Chain Rule, and discuss their robustness to attacks. Our perspective is that the use of simple mechanisms is an unexplored area of blockchain consensus and has the potential to mitigate known trade-offs and enhance scalability.

The core premise of permissionless blockchains is their reliable and secure operation without the need to trust any individual agent. At the heart of blockchain consensus mechanisms is an explicit cost (e.g., mining cost) for participation in the network and the opportunity to add blocks to the blockchain. A key rationale for that cost is to make attacks on the network, which could be theoretically carried out if a majority of nodes were controlled by a single entity, too expensive to be worthwhile. We demonstrate that a majority attacker can successfully attack with a negative net cost when accounting for the mining rewards the attacker collects during the attack. This shows that the protocol mechanisms are insufficient to create a secure network, emphasizing the importance of socially driven mechanisms external to the protocol. At the same time, negative cost enables a new type of majority attack that is more likely to elude external scrutiny. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance.

The amount of computational power devoted to anonymous, decentralized blockchains such as Bitcoin's must simultaneously satisfy two conditions in equilibrium: (1) a zero-profit condition among miners, who engage in a rent-seeking competition for the prize associated with adding the next block to the chain; and (2) an incentive compatibility condition on the system's vulnerability to a “majority attack”, namely that the computational costs of such an attack must exceed the benefits. Together, these two equations imply that (3) the recurring, “flow”, payments to miners for running the blockchain must be large relative to the one-off, “stock”, benefits of attacking it. This is very expensive! The constraint is softer (i.e., stock versus stock) if both (i) the mining technology used to run the blockchain is both scarce and non-repurposable, and (ii) any majority attack is a “sabotage” in that it causes a collapse in the economic value of the blockchain; however, reliance on non-repurposable technology for security and vulnerability to sabotage each raise their own concerns, and point to specific collapse scenarios. In particular, the model suggests that Bitcoin would be majority attacked if it became sufficiently economically important — e.g., if it became a “store of value” akin to gold — which suggests that there are intrinsic economic limits to how economically important it can become in the first place.

The rapid expansion of metaverse platforms underscores the need for sustainable and accessible economic infrastructures. This paper proposes a scalable tokenomics framework for interconnected metaverses, demonstrated on the MANGOs (Metaverse of Academic Nexus for Global Opportunities) platform. Built on a private Ethereum-based blockchain, the framework employs upgradeable smart contracts and custodial wallets to deliver transparency, usability, and adaptability across institutional and social contexts. Core features include an emission model with exponential decay, a dynamic burn mechanism introducing adaptive deflation, and a hybrid marketplace balancing on-chain verifiability with off-chain flexibility. Simulations confirm the sustainability of the emission-burn design, while experiments validate robustness under concurrent loads via backend sequencing and gasless interactions. By bridging usability and decentralization, this work offers a deployable model for non-technical users while preserving blockchain auditability, establishing a foundation for sustainable virtual economies and a reference for future digital economy and large-scale collaboration applications.

… designing token economies, token engineers building mechanism specifications, … burns as the primary supply-reduction mechanism during bootstrapping; PID-controlled emissions …

… Specifically, we demonstrate that mechanisms directly linking token utility … Supply adjustment mechanisms including emission rate modifications and token burns aim to influence token …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) based on smart contracts has reached a total value locked (TVL) of over USD 200 billion in 2022. In DeFi ecosystems, price oracles play a critical role in providing real-time price feeds for cryptocurrencies to ensure accurate asset pricing in smart contracts. However, the price oracle also faces security issues, including the possibility of unanticipated price feeds, which can lead to imbalances in debt and assets in the DeFi protocol. However, existing solutions cannot effectively combine transactions and code for real-time monitoring of price oracles. To address this limitation, we first categorize price oracles as either DON oracles, DEX oracles, or internal oracles based on trusted parties, and analyze their security risks, data sources, price duration, and query fees. Then, we propose VeriOracle, a formal verification framework for the automated detection of unanticipated price feeds in smart contracts. VeriOracle can deploy a formal semantic model of the price oracle on the blockchain to detect the status of smart contracts and identify unanticipated price feed transactions in real time. We apply VeriOracle to verify over 500,000 transactions of 13 vulnerable DeFi protocols in the real world. The experimental results show that (1) VeriOracle is effective and it can detect unanticipated price feeds before DeFi attacks (33,714 blocks ahead of the attacker in the best case); (2) VeriOracle is efficient in that its verification time (about 4s) is less than the block time of Ethereum (about 14s), which means VeriOracle can detect unsafe transactions in real time; and (3) VeriOracle is extendable for verifying defense strategies. Attacks using unanticipated price feeds can only succeed in particular smart contract states. VeriOracle can verify which smart contract states can defend against attacks.

This paper defines Conditional Token (CT) as the token with specific conditions and proposes the use functions for its operations in smart contract so that it can be deployed at the public blockchain. If CTs were exchanged to/equivalent to fiat currency once then all conditions are realized, that is, the required performances and obligations/rights are agreed upon. In use, the obligation-type CT can be used as a divisible mortgage or be used as a representation of accounts receivable, accounts payable and vouchers as it is used in accounting. While the rights-type CT can be used as divisible fixed-income bonds or as an investment vehicle. Integrate both types of CTs with a matching methodology can thus be used in any kind of peer-to-peer (P2P) system of the decentralized finance, such as crowdfunding and P2P lending. This paper thus applying this new model to solve the complex issues of supply chain finance. For feasibility, this study concludes CT is the “Verdinglichung Obligatorischer Rechte”, and CTs are better than the current corporate loans in terms of cost and benefits. In addition, it is capable of transferring risk to other investors. In terms of implementation, this paper proposes a system framework and has completed a proof of concept of the system.