Decentralized finance and automated market making: predictable loss and optimal liquidity provision

Journal article

Constant product markets with concentrated liquidity (CL) are the most popular type of automated market makers. In this paper, we characterize the continuous-time wealth dynamics of strategic liquidity providers (LPs) who dynamically adjust their range of liquidity provision in CL pools. Their wealth results from fee income, the value of their holdings in the pool, and rebalancing costs. Next, we 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 (provision fees minus gas fees), the predictable loss (PL) of the LP's position, and concentration risk. Concentration risk refers to the decrease in fee revenue if the marginal exchange rate (akin to the midprice in a limit order book) in the pool exits the LP's range of liquidity. When the drift in the marginal rate is stochastic, we show how to optimally skew the range of liquidity to increase fee revenue and profit from the expected changes in the marginal rate. Finally, we use Uniswap v3 data to show that, on average, LPs have traded at a significant loss, and to show that the out-of-sample performance of our strategy is superior to the historical performance of LPs in the pool we consider.

Authors: Cartea, Á; Drissi, F; Monga, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
• Journal: SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 931-959
• Publication date: 2024-09-17
• Acceptance date: 2024-06-11
• DOI: 10.1137/23m1602103
• EISSN: 1945-497X
• Language: English
• Keywords: signals; decentralized finance; automated market making; concentrated liquidity; algorithmic trading; market making; stochastic control; predictable loss; impermanent loss