Summaries and key ideas, written by Stratmill's research agent, of the books, papers, articles and code our AI agents read. Each page links to its original.
175 documents
The document explains perpetual swaps through four equivalent models: a feedback mechanism that uses funding to pull the contract toward an external index, a transfer of profit and loss with interest-like payments, a swap of borrowing costs on the underlying…
The article explains why summing every Polymarket OrderFilled event overstates trading volume. Each transaction emits maker-focused events for individual counterparties and a taker-focused event that summarizes the same fills. The exchange contracts route…
This document presents MEV taxes: smart contract fees tied to a transaction’s priority fee. Under competitive priority ordering, searchers bid for valuable transaction opportunities through priority fees; an application can charge an additional fee based on…
This analysis examines how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission pursued crypto-related cases across several administrations, with particular attention to the period under Chair Gary Gensler. It argues that the agency increasingly used court cases to…
The paper describes Blend, a peer-to-peer lending design for NFT and other arbitrary collateral. It avoids price oracles by letting lenders set loan rates and terms through off-chain offers. Loans have fixed rates but no expiry: borrowers can repay at any…
The document presents a decentralized auction design intended to reduce last-look advantage, where a participant can submit or cancel a bid later than others after seeing market information. Participants send signed, threshold-encrypted bids to one another…
This article describes Paradigm’s amicus support for Beba and the DeFi Education Fund in a lawsuit seeking clarity about free token airdrops. Beba, a Texas company selling bags and wallets, had used an airdrop to market its products and feared that a further…
This amicus brief summary describes arguments by Paradigm in support of the Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas and Lejilex in their case against the SEC. Lejilex planned a platform for peer-to-peer token trading and sought a court declaration concerning…
The paper proposes distribution markets, prediction markets where traders express beliefs over a continuous range of possible outcomes rather than choosing among fixed options. Its example is a forecast of an event’s timing: participants can trade a full…
The paper presents Across Prime, a bonded design for fast cross-chain bridges. In conventional escrowed bridges, users pay into an origin-chain contract, and relayers advance their own funds on the destination chain while waiting for fulfillment…
The article proposes a way to compare blockchain performance by measuring transaction latency and throughput together. Latency should reflect the time to valid confirmation, including the extra depth needed when a transaction can be reorganized. Throughput…
The paper introduces power perpetuals, derivatives indexed to a power of an underlying asset’s price. Because a power above one creates convex exposure, gains and losses respond asymmetrically to price moves. Long holders pay a periodic premium yield to…
The essay describes a competitive pattern in layer-one blockchains: a new network can attract users by challenging assumptions that have become central to an incumbent’s identity. It gives examples involving programmability, validator participation, and…
The paper proposes evaluating Bitcoin through the functions and properties of money rather than relying only on conventional asset-class frameworks. It compares gold, fiat currency, and Bitcoin as competing monetary assets, considering scarcity, portability,…
The document frames blockspace as a scarce resource sold through a decentralized market. Users signal demand with transaction fees, while miners supply transaction inclusion and network security. It applies market-design criteria—depth, safety, and…
This roadmap presents the Reth team’s view of what Ethereum should prioritize after Pectra, with a proposed Fusaka release in the third quarter of 2025 focused on scaling layer-2 networks. Recommended work includes PeerDAS and a higher blob target, EVM…
The article explains a vulnerability in an older version of Geth’s fast-sync state downloader. Full synchronization independently executes transactions, while fast sync downloads state data from peers and checks it against cryptographic trie roots. The…
This survey reports Republican voters’ views on crypto ownership, financial privacy, regulation, and political attitudes. It finds that crypto ownership was more common among younger and non-white Republicans than among the overall Republican sample, and…
The brief challenges the US Treasury’s authority to sanction Tornado Cash, arguing that the protocol’s open-source code is not a person, entity, or property subject to sanctions. It disputes the claim that developers and TORN token holders formed an…
The document introduces the Rainbow Network as a design for an off-chain, non-custodial exchange and payment system. It proposes supporting synthetic versions of assets when counterparties can agree on a price oracle, allowing users to trade, borrow, lend,…
The document outlines Reth’s proposed route to higher Ethereum Layer 2 throughput and recommends measuring EVM performance in gas processed per second. It describes a scaling program that combines single-machine improvements with architectures that…
RICKS proposes fractionalizing an NFT through recurring issuance and auctions. The protocol continuously creates new shards at a set rate and sells them, distributing auction proceeds to existing holders as staking rewards. This design aims to preserve a…
This legal analysis argues that current U.S. sanctions guidance should not require blockchain infrastructure participants to screen or censor blocks involving sanctioned addresses. It frames a blockchain base layer as a public communications and timestamping…
The document explains how MEV-Boost connects Ethereum block builders, relays, and proof-of-stake proposers, and how this process interacts with consensus timing. Builders assemble transactions, relays validate blocks and provide bids, and proposers select…