The Adoption of Blockchain-Based Decentralized Exchanges Agostino Capponi,∗ Ruizhe Jia† July 22, 2021 Abstract We investigate the market microstructure of Automated Market Makers (AMMs), the most prominent type of blockchain-based decentralized exchanges. We show that the order execution mechanism yields token value loss for liquidity providers if token exchange rates are volatile. AMMs are adopted only if their token pairs are of high personal use for investors, or the token price movements of the pair are highly correlated. A pricing curve with higher curvature reduces the arbitrage problem but also investors' surplus. Pooling multiple tokens exacerbates the arbitrage problem. We provide statistical support for our main model implications using transaction-level data of AMMs. Keywords: Crypto tokens; FinTech; Decentralized Finance; Market Microstructure. arXiv:2103.08842v4 [q-fin.TR] 21 Jul 2021 ∗Columbia University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Email:
[email protected] †Columbia University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Email:
[email protected]. 1 1 Introduction Since the emergence of Bitcoin in 2008, practitioners and academics have argued that financial inno- vations such as tokenization of assets and decentralized ledgers, along with the backbone blockchain technology, will disrupt traditional financial services (see, e.g., Campbell (2016), Yermack (2017), Cong and He (2019), Chiu and Koeppl (2019), Cong, Li, and Wang (2020), Gan, Tsoukalas, and Netessine (2021)). However, despite thousands of crypto tokens have been created and the total capitalization of cryptocurrencies has exceeded 1.7 trillions as of early 2021, no blockchain-based financial service providers has yet truly challenged traditional financial intermediaries. Ironically, most transactions of crypto tokens still rely on unregulated centralized intermediaries that expose investors to the risk of thefts and exit scams (see, e.g., Gandal et al.