TradFi tactics win on Uniswap v3 says BIS study
A study published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) claims that the most successful liquidity providers on Uniswap v3 are sophisticated institutional agents who mimic the tactics of traditional finance.
Despite the promise of decentralized finance (DeFi) opening up lucrative opportunities to average Joes, the findings show that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
The BIS’ 36-page Working Paper compares “sophisticated and unsophisticated participants” across the top 250 pools, representing 96% of volume on the decentralized exchange (DEX); the groups are defined according to their “behavior and position sizes.”
The “profitability, liquidity provision strategies and responses to market changes” of the two groups were then analyzed to explore “whether DEXs fulfill their promise of ‘democratizing’ financial markets by allowing anyone to participate in liquidity provision without intermediaries.”
Rather than wide-range, passive liquidity provision, the more successful, institutional group adapts to the market in real-time, “[mimicking] traditional bid-ask spreads, enabling them to earn significantly higher profits.”
In addition, these improved gains are further maximized, “especially during periods of high market volatility,” which are typically when LPs face the highest risk.
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A short history of Uniswap liquidity providers
Decentralized exchanges, such as Uniswap, rely on users, known as liquidity providers, who deposit assets into “pools” which can then be used by traders to swap between the assets available.
In return, the providers are paid in the trading fees charged on each trade, with high-volume pairs being the most lucrative. Price volatility between the assets supplied can, however, incur heavy losses.
In Uniswap v1, launched in 2018, all assets were paired against ETH, a risky setup for liquidity providers because of its volatility. The DEX’s v2 introduced pools between pairs of any asset, meaning that providers for stablecoin pairs could earn relatively low-risk yield.
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Uniswap’s v3 introduced the capacity for liquidity providers to specify a range over which their funds could be used to settle trades between assets — a feature known as ‘concentrated liquidity’. This change vastly increased the complexity, and potential profit, of providing liquidity, which had previously been a passive practice.
Hitting the sweet spot
The ability to adjust the range of their positions according to market conditions lets providers zero in on the most efficient use of their funds. However, the accumulation of “gas” fees required for fine-grained adjustments can make this viable only for the larger players.
The researchers found that sophisticated participants tend to avoid asset pairs with sustained volatility but capitalize on shorter periods of volatility by widening their range. Retail users tended to do the opposite and made fewer adjustments on high-volatility days.
Overall, “retail liquidity providers are outcompeted by a small group of sophisticated agents” who “hold about 80% of total value locked and focus… on liquidity pools that have the most trading volume and are less volatile.”
In contrast, the net profitability of retail users is skewed by a handful of especially successful examples, and on “more than half of the days [studied], retail liquidity providers lose money.”
While DeFi’s promise to democratize finance may be a noble goal, the study concludes that centralizing forces in traditional finance “are likely inherent characteristics of the financial system, even in DeFi.”
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