Paper: arXiv 2610.21510
Authors: Aleksei Adadurov, Eduard Airapetian, Anton Chtepine, Antero Eloranta, Boris Pletenev, Andrei Sebyakin, Arsenii Valitov
Abstract
We study the spread a liquidity provider needs to break even against counterparties that can exploit a stale quote, and we place two defenses on a single scale: repricing sooner and screening informed flow. A break-even condition pins down the exact screening rate at which a slower maker matches a faster unscreened venue: the selection that buys back the extra staleness. The result requires only an integrable price innovation and therefore holds under jumps, atoms, and infinite variance. Predictable drift is a centering problem: it widens a spot-centered quote, but its cost vanishes once the quote is recentered on the expected reference. In four USDC-WETH pools benchmarked against Binance ETH-USDT from June to August 2026, the one-second benchmark innovation is sharply non-Gaussian: 73% of seconds show no price change. Cutting cadence from twelve seconds to one sheds 84.5% of the expected shock, so a twelve-second maker must screen at least 84.5% of informed flow to match a one-second venue, far above the 71.1% that a Gaussian model implies. In trending markets, the stale pool is picked off at execution: with-trend fills obtain an effective spread 11.1 bps lower than against-trend fills, with the same sign in all four pools.
Complexity vs Empirical Score
- Math Complexity: 7.5/10
- Empirical Rigor: 8.0/10
- Quadrant: Holy Grail — high math complexity, high empirical rigor
Why this score: This paper presents a sophisticated theoretical model for liquidity provision under adverse selection, rigorously tested with real-world cryptocurrency data. Its novel approach to quantifying the trade-off between repricing speed and informed flow screening is a significant contribution.
Research Flowchart
flowchart TD
A[Research Goal: Break-even Spread for LPs] --> B{Key Methodology: Quantify Screening vs. Repricing};
B --> C[Data/Inputs: USDC-WETH pools, Binance ETH-USDT (June-Aug 2026)];
C --> D{Computational Process: Model Price Innovation, Break-even Condition, Empirical Analysis};
D --> E[Key Finding 1: Non-Gaussian Price Innovation (73% no change in 1s)];
E --> F[Key Finding 2: Slower Maker Needs High Screening (84.5% vs 71.1% Gaussian)];
F --> G[Key Finding 3: Trending Markets = Execution Pick-off (11.1 bps lower effective spread with-trend)];
Cited References (69)
- The Only Game in Town (1971)
- The Supply of Dealer Services in Securities Markets (1978)
- Optimal Dealer Pricing under Transactions and Return Uncertainty (1981)
- Information Effects on the Bid-Ask Spread (1983)
- Bid, Ask and Transaction Prices in a Specialist Market with Heterogeneously Informed Traders (1985)
- Continuous Auctions and Insider Trading (1985)
- Price, Trade Size, and Information in Securities Markets (1987)
- Sunshine Trading and Financial Market Equilibrium (1991)
and 61 more
- Transparency and Liquidity: A Comparison of Auction and Dealer Markets with Informed Trading (1996)
- Measuring the Information Content of Stock Trades (1991)
- One Security, Many Markets: Determining the Contributions to Price Discovery (1995) — link
- Stock Market Prices Do Not Follow Random Walks: Evidence from a Simple Specification Test (1988) — link
- Stochastic Orders (2007) — link
- Assessing the Quality of a Security Market: A New Approach to Transaction-Cost Measurement (1993)
- Inferring Trade Direction from Intraday Data (1991)
- Liquidity, Information, and Infrequently Traded Stocks (1996)
- A Comparison of Trade Execution Costs for NYSE and NASDAQ -Listed Stocks (1997)
- The Accuracy of Trade Classification Rules: Evidence from Nasdaq (2000)
- Trade Classification Algorithms for Electronic Communications Network Trades (2007)
- An Ex-Ante Measure of the Probability of Informed Trading (2008)
- Flow Toxicity and Liquidity in a High-Frequency World (2012)
- VPIN and the Flash Crash (2014)
- VPIN and the Flash Crash: A Rejoinder (2014)
- Tracking Retail Investor Activity (2021)
- Consolidation, Fragmentation, and the Disclosure of Trading Information (1995)
- Should Securities Markets Be Transparent? (2005)
- Does Anonymity Matter in Electronic Limit Order Markets? (2007)
- Informed Traders as Liquidity Providers: Anonymity, Liquidity and Price Formation (2008)
- Do Dark Pools Harm Price Discovery? (2014)
- The Impact of Dark Trading and Visible Fragmentation on Market Quality (2015)
- A Simple Model of Payment for Order Flow, Internalization, and Total Trading Cost (2001)
- Competition for Order Flow and Smart Order Routing Systems (2008)
- Trading Fees and Efficiency in Limit Order Markets (2012)
- Subsidizing Liquidity: The Impact of Make/Take Fees on Market Quality (2015)
- The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response (2015)
- Latency Arbitrage, Market Fragmentation, and Efficiency: A Two-Market Model (2013)
- Need for Speed? Exchange Latency and Liquidity (2017)
- Too Fast or Too Slow? Determining the Optimal Speed of Financial Markets (2018)
- High-Frequency Trading and Market Performance (2020)
- Order-Flow Segmentation, Liquidity, and Price Discovery: The Role of Latency Delays (2020)
- Quantifying the High-Frequency Trading ``Arms Race’’ (2022)
- A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation: Will the Market Fix the Market? (2024)
- Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning in Decentralized Exchanges, Miner Extractable Value, and Consensus Instability (2020)
- Trading and Arbitrage in Cryptocurrency Markets (2020)
- Frontrunner Jones and the Raiders of the Dark Forest: An Empirical Study of Frontrunning on the Ethereum Blockchain (2021)
- Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How Dark Is the Forest? (2022)
- Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why? (2024)
- On the Quality of Cryptocurrency Markets: Centralized vs.\ Decentralized Exchanges (2026) — link
- Measuring CEX - DEX Extracted Value and Searcher Profitability: The Darkest of the MEV Dark Forest (2025)
- Execution Welfare Across Solver-Based DEXes (2025)
- Second Thoughts: How 1-Second Subslots Transform CEX - DEX Arbitrage on Ethereum (2026)
- Improved Price Oracles: Constant Function Market Makers (2020)
- An Analysis of Uniswap Markets (2021)
- Optimal Fees for Geometric Mean Market Makers (2021)
- The Adoption of Blockchain-Based Decentralized Exchanges (2021)
- Impermanent Loss in Uniswap v3 (2021)
- Risks and Returns of Uniswap V3 Liquidity Providers (2022)
- Automated Market Making and Loss-Versus-Rebalancing (2022)
- A Myersonian Framework for Optimal Liquidity Provision in Automated Market Makers — → 2303.00208
- Automated Market Making and Arbitrage Profits in the Presence of Fees — → 2305.14604
- Diamonds Are Forever, Loss-Versus-Rebalancing Is Not (2022)
- A Theory of Automated Market Makers in DeFi (2022)
- Weighted Variance Swaps Hedge Against Impermanent Loss (2023)
- The Need for Fees at a DEX : How Increases in Fees Can Increase DEX Trading Volume (2023)
- Decentralized Exchange: The Uniswap Automated Market Maker (2025)
- am- AMM : An Auction-Managed Automated Market Maker (2024)
- Coexisting Exchange Platforms: Limit Order Books and Automated Market Makers (2024)
- Decentralised Finance and Automated Market Making: Predictable Loss and Optimal Liquidity Provision (2024)
- Axioms for Automated Market Makers: A Mathematical Framework in FinTech and Decentralized Finance (2025)
2 of 69 cited works are in the corpus; resolved via arXiv source bundles, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Corpus-wide: 2518 linked papers.