Blockchain@X
Research Center

We bring together researchers in computer science and economics whose research focus on blockchains and associated technologies.

Our mission

The Blockchain & Platform chair combines academic excellence with business & tech leadership to foster blockchain innovation.

Research

The Blockchain@X Research Center is directed by Daniel Augot and Julien Prat. It is composed of researchers and Ph.D. students at the Ecole Poytechnique as well as of associate researchers dedicated to these four areas of expertise :

Publications

Discover the publications produced by the researchers
from Blockchain@X research center at Ecole Polytechnique.

Contagion in Decentralized Lending Protocols: A Case Study of Compound

We study financial contagion in Compound V2, a decentralized lending protocol deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. We explain how to construct the balance sheets of Compound’s liquidity pools and use our methodology to characterize the financial network. Our analysis reveals that most users either borrow stablecoins or engage in liquidity mining. We then study the robustness of Compound through a series of stress tests, identifying the pools that are most likely to set off a cascade of defaults.

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Julien Prat

The Economics of Constant Function Market Makers

We use microeconomic theory to describe the inner workings of Constant Function Market Makers (CFMMs). We show that standard results from consumer theory apply in this new context, endowing us with powerful tools to characterize the optimal design of CFMMs. We employ them to analyze the externalities that traders and liquidity providers exert on each other when interacting through a CFMM. Liquidity providers reduce the execution costs by flattening the bonding curve on which trades are executed. Arbitrageurs impose an adverse selection cost on liquidity providers by unfavorably rebalancing their portfolio. We show that the strengths of these two externalities are pinned down by the curvature of the bonding curve and are inversely related to each other, thereby identifying the fundamental economic tradeoff that market designers have to address.

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Outlooks

Discover the outlooks produced by the team from the Blockchain@X research center at Ecole Polytechnique.

Daniel Augot

Rollups: a Powerful Scaling Mechanism

One of the major challenges in the world of blockchains is that of scaling up, particularly in terms of throughput, i.e. the number of transactions per second. One way to increase throughput is to use a block validation system other than the one based on proof of work…

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Louis Bertucci

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Decentralized Finance

Decentralized Finance is a major innovation trend that is shaking the FinTech world. DeFi refers to a universe of financial applications that rely on blockchain technology to achieve decentralization. In other words, DeFi applications allow their users to perform traditional financial operations…

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Education

We provide a series of courses at the Ecole polytechnique for students and professionals that wish to foster their understanding of DLT and blockchains.

Events

Discover our physical and online events, as well as the webinars
offered by the Blockchain@X research center at Ecole Polytechnique.

Blockchain@X-OMI Workshop

A joint workshop with the University of Oxford on decentralized finance, decentralized identity, blockchain, and distributed machine learning.

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