Automated Market Making and Decentralized Finance

TL;DR

This paper formalizes and analyzes trading mechanisms of concentrated liquidity constant product market makers in decentralized finance, developing optimal strategies for liquidity providers and takers using market data and machine learning.

Contribution

It introduces a formal model of CPMMs with CL, derives optimal trading strategies, and employs neural networks for model-free liquidity provision in DeFi markets.

Findings

Optimal strategies for large traders using market signals from competing venues.

Liquidity provision strategies based on stochastic control and neural networks.

Empirical validation with Uniswap v3 data and crypto market analysis.

Abstract

Automated market makers (AMMs) are a new type of trading venues which are revolutionising the way market participants interact. At present, the majority of AMMs are constant function market makers (CFMMs) where a deterministic trading function determines how markets are cleared. Within CFMMs, we focus on constant product market makers (CPMMs) which implements the concentrated liquidity (CL) feature. In this thesis we formalise and study the trading mechanism of CPMMs with CL, and we develop liquidity provision and liquidity taking strategies. Our models are motivated and tested with market data. We derive optimal strategies for liquidity takers (LTs) who trade orders of large size and execute statistical arbitrages. First, we consider an LT who trades in a CPMM with CL and uses the dynamics of prices in competing venues as market signals. We use Uniswap v3 data to study price, liquidity, and trading cost dynamics, and to motivate the model. Next, we consider an LT who trades a basket of crypto-currencies whose constituents co-move. We use market data to study lead-lag effects, spillover effects, and causality between trading venues. We derive optimal strategies for strategic liquidity providers (LPs) who provide liquidity in CPMM with CL. First, we use stochastic control tools to derive a self-financing and closed-form optimal liquidity provision strategy where the width of the LP's liquidity range is determined by the profitability of the pool, the dynamics of the LP's position, and concentration risk. Next, we use a model-free approach to solve the problem of an LP who provides liquidity in multiple CPMMs with CL. We do not specify a model for the stochastic processes observed by LPs, and use a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to approximate the optimal liquidity provision strategy.