In this paper, we introduce a suite of models for price-aware automated market making platforms willing to optimize their quotes. These models incorporate advanced price dynamics, including stochastic volatility, jumps, and microstructural price models based on Hawkes processes. Additionally, we address the variability in demand from liquidity takers through models that employ either Hawkes or Markov-modulated Poisson processes. Each model is analyzed with particular emphasis placed on the complexity of the numerical methods required to compute optimal quotes.
Liquidity providers are essential for the function of decentralized exchanges to ensure liquidity takers can be guaranteed a counterparty for their trades. However, liquidity providers investing in liquidity pools face many risks, the most prominent of which is impermanent loss. Currently, analysis of this metric is difficult to conduct due to different market maker algorithms, fee structures and concentrated liquidity dynamics across the various exchanges. To this end, we provide a framework to generalize impermanent loss for multiple asset pools obeying any constant function market maker wit…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Liquidity Providers on Automated Market Makers generate millions of USD in transaction fees daily. However, the net value of a Liquidity Position is vulnerable to price changes in the underlying assets in the pool. The dominant measure of loss in a Liquidity Position is Impermanent Loss. Impermanent Loss for Constant Function Market Makers has been widely studied. We propose a new metric to measure Liquidity Position PNL based on price movement from the underlying assets. We show how this new metric more appropriately measures the change in the net value of a Liquidity Position as a function o…
We introduce a class of utility-based market makers that always accept orders at their risk-neutral prices. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for such market makers to have bounded loss. We prove that hyperbolic absolute risk aversion utility market makers are equivalent to weighted pseudospherical scoring rule market makers. In particular, Hanson's logarithmic scoring rule market maker corresponds to a negative exponential utility market maker in our framework. We describe a third equivalent formulation based on maintaining a cost function that seems most natural for implementatio…
Traditional market makers are losing their importance as automated systems have largely assumed the role of liquidity provision in markets. We update the model of Glosten and Milgrom (1985) to analyze this new world: we add multiple securities and introduce an automated market maker who uses the relationships between securities to price order flow. This new automated participant transacts the majority of orders, sets prices that are more efficient, and increases informed and decreases uninformed traders' transaction costs. These results can explain the recent dominance of high frequency tradin…
The standard approach for compensating liquidity providers on many decentralized exchanges (DEX) for serving as counter-party to swaps is through charging a small percentage of fees. The expected payoff from the cash flow of this mode of market making has yet to be mathematically formulated in terms of volatility in the existing literature. We provide here a preliminary derivation of the payoff formula, by making the standard set of assumptions for efficient markets, namely geometric Brownian price movements and zero arbitrage. Trading volume, conventionally taken as an exogenous variable for …
Two popular forms of automated market makers are constant sum and constant product (CSMM and CPMM respectively). Each has its advantages and disadvantages: CSMMs have stable exchange rates but are vulnerable to arbitrage and can sometimes fail to provide liquidity, while a CPMM can have large impermanent loss due to exchange rate changes but are always able to provide liquidity to participants. A significant amount of work has been done in order to get the best of both constant sum and constant product characteristics. Perhaps most the relevant to this paper is Stableswap, which has an "amplif…
Automated market makers (AMM) have grown to obtain significant market share within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, resulting in a proliferation of new products pursuing exotic strategies for horizontal differentiation. Yet, their theoretical properties are curiously homogeneous when a set of basic assumptions are met. In this paper, we start by presenting a universal approach to deriving a formula for liquidity provisioning for AMMs. Next, we show that the constant function market maker and token swap market maker models are theoretically equivalent when liquidity reserves are uniform. Proceedin…
We consider an exchange who wishes to set suitable make-take fees to attract liquidity on its platform. Using a principal-agent approach, we are able to describe in quasi-explicit form the optimal contract to propose to a market maker. This contract depends essentially on the market maker inventory trajectory and on the volatility of the asset. We also provide the optimal quotes that should be displayed by the market maker. The simplicity of our formulas allows us to analyze in details the effects of optimal contracting with an exchange, compared to a situation without contract. We show in par…
Since they were authorized by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission in 1998, electronic exchanges have boomed, and by 2010 high frequency trading accounted for over 70% of equity trades in the US. Such markets are thought to increase liquidity because of the presence of market makers, who are willing to trade as counterparties at any time, in exchange for a fee, the bid-ask spread. In this paper, we propose an equilibrium model showing how such market makers provide liquidity. The model relies on a codebook for client trades, the implied alpha. After solving the individual clients optimiza…
Constant Function Market Makers (CFMMs) are a family of automated market makers that enable censorship-resistant decentralized exchange on public blockchains. Arbitrage trades have been shown to align the prices reported by CFMMs with those of external markets. These trades impose costs on Liquidity Providers (LPs) who supply reserves to CFMMs. Trading fees have been proposed as a mechanism for compensating LPs for arbitrage losses. However, large fees reduce the accuracy of the prices reported by CFMMs and can cause reserves to deviate from desirable asset compositions. CFMM designers are the…
We analyse two models of liquidity provision to determine the retail traders' preference for marketable order routing. Order internalization is captured by a model of market makers competing for the retail order flow in a Bertrand fashion. On the other hand, the price-taking competitive liquidity providers characterize the open exchange model. We show that, when liquidity providers are risk averse, routing of the marketable orders to the wholesalers is preferred by all retail traders: informed, uninformed and noisy. The unwillingness of liquidity providers to bear risk causes the strategic tra…
We provide an explicit characterization of the optimal market making strategy in a discrete-time Limit Order Book (LOB). In our model, the number of filled orders during each period depends linearly on the distance between the fundamental price and the market maker's limit order quotes, with random slope and intercept coefficients. The high-frequency market maker (HFM) incurs an end-of-the-day liquidation cost resulting from linear price impact. The optimal placement strategy incorporates in a novel and parsimonious way forecasts about future changes in the asset's fundamental price. We show t…
Geometric mean market makers (G3Ms), such as Uniswap and Balancer, comprise a popular class of automated market makers (AMMs) defined by the following rule: the reserves of the AMM before and after each trade must have the same (weighted) geometric mean. This paper extends several results known for constant-weight G3Ms to the general case of G3Ms with time-varying and potentially stochastic weights. These results include the returns and no-arbitrage prices of liquidity pool (LP) shares that investors receive for supplying liquidity to G3Ms. Using these expressions, we show how to create G3Ms w…
Growth rate of liquidity provider's wealth in G3Ms
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；Baruch College, The City University of New York（纽约市立大学巴鲁克学院）
In most OTC markets, a small number of market makers provide liquidity to other market participants. More precisely, for a list of assets, they set prices at which they agree to buy and sell. Market makers face therefore an interesting optimization problem: they need to choose bid and ask prices for making money while mitigating the risk associated with holding inventory in a volatile market. Many market making models have been proposed in the academic literature, most of them dealing with single-asset market making whereas market makers are usually in charge of a long list of assets. The rare…
Pari-mutuel markets are trading platforms through which the common market maker simultaneously clears multiple contingent claims markets. This market has several distinctive properties that began attracting the attention of the financial industry in the 2000s. For example, the platform aggregates liquidity from the individual contingent claims market into the common pool while shielding the market maker from potential financial loss. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we provide a new economic interpretation of the market-clearing strategy of a pari-mutuel market that is well k…
Market makers continuously set bid and ask quotes for the stocks they have under consideration. Hence they face a complex optimization problem in which their return, based on the bid-ask spread they quote and the frequency at which they indeed provide liquidity, is challenged by the price risk they bear due to their inventory. In this paper, we consider a stochastic control problem similar to the one introduced by Ho and Stoll and formalized mathematically by Avellaneda and Stoikov. The market is modeled using a reference price $S_t$ following a Brownian motion with standard deviation $σ$, arr…
Recently, most stock exchanges in the U.S. employ maker-taker fees, in which an exchange pays rebates to traders placing orders in the order book and charges fees to traders taking orders from the order book. Maker-taker fees encourage traders to place many orders that provide market liquidity to the exchange. However, it is not clear how maker-taker fees affect the total cost of a taking order, including all the charged fees and the market impact. In this study, we investigated the effect of maker-taker fees on the total cost of a taking order with our artificial market model, which is an age…
Following the recent literature on make take fees policies, we consider an exchange wishing to set a suitable contract with several market makers in order to improve trading quality on its platform. To do so, we use a principal-agent approach, where the agents (the market makers) optimise their quotes in a Nash equilibrium fashion, providing best response to the contract proposed by the principal (the exchange). This contract aims at attracting liquidity on the platform. This is because the wealth of the exchange depends on the arrival of market orders, which is driven by the spread of market …
We establish connections between optimal transport theory and the dynamic version of the Kyle model, including new characterizations of informed trading profits via conjugate duality and Monge-Kantorovich duality. We use these connections to extend the model to multiple assets, general distributions, and risk-averse market makers. With risk-averse market makers, liquidity is lower, assets exhibit short-term reversals, and risk premia depend on market maker inventories, which are mean reverting. We illustrate the model by showing that implied volatilities predict stock returns when there is inf…
One of the exciting recent developments in decentralized finance (DeFi) has been the development of decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges that can autonomously handle conversion between different cryptocurrencies. Decentralized exchange protocols such as Uniswap, Curve and other types of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) maintain a liquidity pool (LP) of two or more assets constrained to maintain at all times a mathematical relation to each other, defined by a given function or curve. Examples of such functions are the constant-sum and constant-product AMMs. Existing systems however suffer from …
We consider a dynamic market model where buyers and sellers submit limit orders. If at a given moment in time, the buyer is unable to complete his entire order due to the shortage of sell orders at the required limit price, the unmatched part of the order is recorded in the order book. Subsequently these buy unmatched orders may be matched with new incoming sell orders. The resulting demand curve constitutes the sole input to our model. The clearing price is then mechanically calculated using the market clearing condition. We use a Brownian sheet to model the demand curve, and provide some the…
Constant function market makers (CFMMs) such as Uniswap have facilitated trillions of dollars of digital asset trades and have billions of dollars of liquidity. One natural question is how to optimally route trades across a network of CFMMs in order to ensure the largest possible utility (as specified by a user). We present an efficient algorithm, based on a decomposition method, to solve the problem of optimally executing an order across a network of decentralized exchanges. The decomposition method, as a side effect, makes it simple to incorporate more complicated CFMMs, or even include 'agg…
