We demonstrate that increasing trading fees at a decentralized exchange (DEX) can increase DEX trading volume. This result arises due to the fact that higher DEX fees can endogenously reduce the price impact of trading at the DEX, thereby reducing the overall DEX trading cost and driving trading activity to the DEX from competing exchanges. The referenced relationship between fees and price impacts arises because...

We develop a model of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending platforms that set interest rates as programmable functions of the utilization of available funds. These platforms are unable to incorporate off-chain information into the platform’s interest rates, leading to inefficient DeFi equilibria that feature excess demand or supply. Absent uncertainty about withdrawals, these inefficiencies can be made arbitrarily small through an interest rate function that is...

We develop an economic model to compare equilibrium security of Proof-of-Work (PoW) versus Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. We derive general conditions to determine when PoW blockchains are more secure than otherwise equivalent PoS blockchains and vice versa. Applying real-world parameter values to these conditions, we demonstrate that PoS blockchains are more secure than otherwise equivalent PoW blockchains. Furthermore, we demonstrate that PoS's security advantage over PoW...