Thursday, November 19, 2020

Missing pit boss function causes Flash Loan arbitrage in Defi

there has been some money6 made in decentralized finance from abritrage opportunities.  All of these opportunities result from bad market information reported by Oracles, and hat market information is used for collateral. 

Defi calls Oracles what I call trusted miners. Oracles however only supply current price, or last price. The current problem is missing information because of th lack of pit boss function..

Asset price is no good to report. Congestion on the exchange is what is needed to report, bid ask ratio is better.  Or a volatility index works. If the exchange does not carry pit boss market risk then the exchange can be manipulated as it becomes the equivalent of an over the counter market.

Flash loans are like cash in advance, but again, there is no market, it is over the counter.

The exploits are all about the missing pit boss in these exchanges. The result is an OTC market is because the Oracle just reports the last OTC deal and ignores market congestion.

There are a lot of exploits that can makes money using the Oracle and Flash loans because other swaps are based on Oracle results, always in error, absent a pit boss function at the reported exchange.

This is what current Defi misses, a measure of pit boss market risk; a failure to distinguish between OTC and trading pits, they are different animals.  If you want an Oracle to report stats on OTC trades then that is an insurance function. The insurance function tracks previous strings of OTC trades and compute the equivalent of a pit boss market risk.

Scott Summers keeps saying, one cannot argue from a relative price change.  The meaning is that one cannot argue (or loan money) from that last OTC trade. The relevant information is the market risk. That is an options risk based on congestion which is unreported.

Anyway, the problem can be fixed, we need automated pit bosses or enhance the Oracle function to a OTC option market that can insure price for a fee.  In other words, the pit boss function has to be implemented or simulated.

Markov 2-tuples are not a tree.

Another way to state the problem, With no third prime for the pit boss, the last price reported by the oracle is a 2 tuple, there is only one energy level and the Oracle is assuming all trades are homogeneous. This became fairly obvious many year ago in sandbox.

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