Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an integral component of the blockchain ecosystem, enabling a range of financial activities through smart-contract-based protocols. Traditional Decentralized finance (DeFi) governance typically involves manual parameter adjustments by protocol teams or token holder votes, and is thus prone to human bias and financial risks, undermining the system's integrity and security. While existing efforts aim to establish more adaptive parameter adjustment schemes, there remains a need for a governance model that is both more efficient and resilient to significant market manipulations. In this paper, we introduce “Auto.gov”, a learning-based governance framework that employs a Deep Q-network (DQN) Reinforcement learning (RL) strategy to perform semi-automated, data-driven parameter adjustments. We create a DeFi environment with an encoded action-state space akin to the Aave lending protocol for simulation and testing purposes, where Auto.gov has demonstrated the capability to retain funds that would have otherwise been lost to price oracle attacks. In tests with real-world data, Auto.gov outperforms the benchmark approaches by at least 14% and the static baseline model by tenfold, in terms of the preset performance metric—protocol profitability. Overall, the comprehensive evaluations confirm that Auto.gov is more efficient and effective than traditional governance methods, thereby enhancing the security, profitability, and ultimately, the sustainability of DeFi protocols.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a blockchain powered peer-to-peer financial system, is mushrooming. Two years ago the total value locked in DeFi systems was approximately 700m USD, now, as of April 2022, it stands at around 150bn USD. The frenetic evolution of the ecosystem has created challenges in understanding the basic principles of these systems and their security risks. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) we delineate the DeFi ecosystem along the following axes: its primitives, its operational protocol types and its security. We provide a distinction between technical security, which has a healthy literature, and economic security, which is largely unexplored, connecting the latter with new models and thereby synthesizing insights from computer science, economics and finance. Finally, we outline the open research challenges in the ecosystem across these security types.

We coin the term Protocols for Loanable Funds (PLFs) to refer to protocols which establish distributed ledger-based markets for loanable funds. PLFs are emerging as one of the main applications within Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and use smart contract code to facilitate the intermediation of loanable funds. In doing so, these protocols allow agents to borrow and save programmatically. Within these protocols, interest rate mechanisms seek to equilibrate the supply and demand for funds. In this paper, we review the methodologies used to set interest rates on three prominent DeFi PLFs, namely Compound, Aave and dYdX. We provide an empirical examination of how these interest rate rules have behaved since their inception in response to differing degrees of liquidity. We then investigate the market efficiency and inter-connectedness between multiple protocols, examining first whether Uncovered Interest Parity holds within a particular protocol and second whether the interest rates for a particular token market show dependence across protocols, developing a Vector Error Correction Model for the dynamics.

Distributed computing systems often consist of hundreds of nodes (machines), executing tasks with different resource requirements. Efficient resource provisioning and task scheduling in such systems are non-trivial and require close monitoring and accurate forecasting of the state of the system, specifically resource utilisation at its constituent machines. Two challenges present themselves towards these objectives.First, collecting monitoring data entails substantial communication overhead. This overhead can be prohibitively high, especially in networks where bandwidth is limited. Second, forecasting models to predict resource utilisation should be accurate and also need to exhibit high inference speed. Mission critical scheduling and resource allocation algorithms use these predictions and rely on their immediate availability.To address the first challenge, we present a communication-efficient data collection mechanism. Resource utilisation data is collected at the individual machines in the system and transmitted to a central controller in batches. Each batch is processed by an adaptive data-reduction algorithm based on Fourier transforms and truncation in the frequency domain. We show that the proposed mechanism leads to a significant reduction in communication overhead while incurring only minimal error and adhering to accuracy guarantees. To address the second challenge, we propose a deep learning architecture using complex Gated Recurrent Units to forecast resource utilisation. This architecture is directly integrated with the above data collection mechanism to improve inference speed of the presented forecasting model. Using two real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both in terms of forecasting accuracy and inference speed.Our approach resolves several challenges encountered in resource provisioning frameworks and can also be generically applied to other forecasting problems.

Scalability has been a bottleneck for major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Despite the significantly improved scalability claimed by several high-profile blockchain projects, there has been little effort to understand how their transactional throughput is being used. In this paper, we examine recent network traffic of three major high-scalability blockchains---EOSIO, Tezos and XRP Ledger (XRPL)---over a period of seven months. Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of the transactions are used for value transfer purposes. In particular, 96% of the transactions on EOSIO were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless token; on Tezos, 76% of throughput was used for maintaining consensus; and over 94% of transactions on XRPL carried no economic value. We also identify a persisting airdrop on EOSIO as a DoS attack and detect a two-month-long spam attack on XRPL. The paper explores the different designs of the three blockchains and sheds light on how they could shape user behavior.

Clone detection across programs written in the same programming language has been studied extensively in the literature. On the contrary, the task of detecting clones across multiple programming languages has not been studied as much, and approaches based on comparison cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we present a clone detection method based on semi-supervised machine learning designed to detect clones across programming languages with similar syntax. Our method uses an unsupervised learning approach to learn token-level vector representations and an LSTM-based neural network to predict whether two code fragments are clones. To train our network, we present a cross-language code clone dataset - which is to the best of our knowledge the first of its kind - containing around 45,000 code fragments written in Java and Python. We evaluate our approach on the dataset we created and show that our method gives promising results when detecting similarities between code fragments written in Java and Python.