Liquidity providers (LPs) are essential figures in the operation of automated market makers (AMMs); in exchange for transaction fees, LPs lend the liquidity that allows AMMs to operate. While many prior works have studied the incentive structures of LPs in general, we currently lack a principled understanding of a special class of LPs known as Just-In-Time (JIT) LPs. These are strategic agents who momentarily supply liquidity for a single swap, in an attempt to extract disproportionately high fees relative to the remaining passive LPs. This paper provides the first formal, transaction-level model of JIT liquidity provision for a widespread class of AMMs known as Concentrated Liquidity Market Makers (CLMMs), as seen in Uniswap V3, for instance. We characterize the landscape of price impact and fee allocation in these systems, formulate and analyze a non-linear optimization problem faced by JIT LPs, and prove the existence of an optimal strategy. By fitting our optimal solution for JIT LPs to real-world CLMMs, we observe that in liquidity pools (particularly those with risky assets), there is a significant gap between observed and optimal JIT behavior. Existing JIT LPs often fail to account for price impact; doing so, we estimate they could increase earnings by up to 69% on average over small time windows. We also show that JIT liquidity, when deployed strategically, can improve market efficiency reducing slippage for traders, albeit at the cost of eroding passive LP profits by up to 44% per trade on average.

Crash fault tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms are commonly used in scenarios where system components are trusted -- e.g., enterprise settings and government infrastructure. However, CFT consensus can be broken by even a single corrupt node. A desirable property in the face of such potential Byzantine faults is \emph{accountability}: if a corrupt node breaks protocol and affects consensus safety, it should be possible to identify the culpable components with cryptographic integrity from the node states. Today, the best-known protocol for providing accountability to CFT protocols is called PeerReview; it essentially records a signed transcript of all messages sent during the CFT protocol. Because PeerReview is agnostic to the underlying CFT protocol, it incurs high communication and storage overhead. We propose CFT-Forensics, an accountability framework for CFT protocols. We show that for a special family of \emph{forensics-compliant} CFT protocols (which includes widely-used CFT protocols like Raft and multi-Paxos), CFT-Forensics gives provable accountability guarantees. Under realistic deployment settings, we show theoretically that CFT-Forensics operates at a fraction of the cost of PeerReview. We subsequently instantiate CFT-Forensics for Raft, and implement Raft-Forensics as an extension to the popular nuRaft library. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Raft-Forensics adds low overhead to vanilla Raft. With 256 byte messages, Raft-Forensics achieves a peak throughput 87.8\% of vanilla Raft at 46\% higher latency ($+44$ ms). We finally integrate Raft-Forensics into the open-source central bank digital currency OpenCBDC, and show that in wide-area network experiments, Raft-Forensics achieves 97.8\% of the throughput of Raft, with 14.5\% higher latency ($+326$ ms).

Abstract Question‐Answering (Q&A) services provide internet users with platforms to exchange knowledge and ideas. The development of Q&A sites, or Community Question Answering (CQA), mainly depends on the high‐quality content continuously contributed by users with high‐level expertise, who can be recognized as experts. Expert finding is an important task for the authorities of Q&A communities to encourage commitment. In a highly competitive market environment, CQA managers have to take measures to retain and nurture users, especially superior contributors. However, current expertise scoring techniques adopted in CQA often give much credit to very active users and fail to identify real experts. This study aims to develop a robust and practical expert identification framework for Q&A communities, by combining well‐designed expertise scoring technique and probabilistic clustering model. With regard to expert identification, a numerical metric of users' expertise is developed as the optimal expert finding strategy, and a clustering algorithm based on Gaussian‐Gamma mixture model (GGMM) is proposed to efficiently distinguish experts from nonexperts. In the experiments, the proposed method is applied to real‐world datasets collected from subcommunities of Stack Exchange Q&A networks. Results obtained from comparative experiments show that our method achieves better performance than the state‐of‐the‐art methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The analysis shows that the framework which combines the proposed expertise scoring technique and Gaussian–Gamma mixture clustering model is capable of detecting excellent domain problem‐solving experts who exhibit both domain interest and expertise.