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Towards A First Step to Understand Flash Loan and Its Applications in DeFi Ecosystem

Published: 25 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Flash Loan, as an emerging service in the decentralized finance ecosystem, allows users to request a non-collateral loan. While providing convenience, it also enables attackers to launch malicious operations with a large amount of asset that they do not have. Though there exist spot media reports of attacks that leverage Flash Loan, there lacks a comprehensive understanding of existing Flash Loan services.
In this work, we take the first step to study the Flash Loan service provided by three popular platforms. Specifically, we first illustrate the interactions between Flash Loan providers and users. Then, we design three patterns to identify Flash Loan transactions. Based on the patterns, 76,303 transactions are determined. The evaluation results show that the Flash Loan services get more popular over time. At last, we present four Flash Loan applications with real-world examples and propose two potential research directions.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (sbc2021_fp08.mp4)
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Optimal Flash Loan Fee Function with Respect to Leverage StrategiesProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3635637.3663050(1874-1882)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2024)DeFi's Transformative Influence on the Global Financial LandscapeDigital Technologies, Ethics, and Decentralization in the Digital Era10.4018/979-8-3693-1762-4.ch006(99-120)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Providing Security for Flash Loan System Using Cryptocurrency Wallets Supported by XSalsa20 in a Blockchain EnvironmentApplied Sciences10.3390/app1414636114:14(6361)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SBC '21: Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Security in Blockchain and Cloud Computing
    May 2021
    40 pages
    ISBN:9781450384056
    DOI:10.1145/3457977
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 25 May 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. DeFi
    2. blockchain
    3. flash loan

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    • Research-article

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    • Leading Innovative and Entrepreneur Team Introduction Program of Zhejiang
    • Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

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    ASIA CCS '21
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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Optimal Flash Loan Fee Function with Respect to Leverage StrategiesProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3635637.3663050(1874-1882)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
    • (2024)DeFi's Transformative Influence on the Global Financial LandscapeDigital Technologies, Ethics, and Decentralization in the Digital Era10.4018/979-8-3693-1762-4.ch006(99-120)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Providing Security for Flash Loan System Using Cryptocurrency Wallets Supported by XSalsa20 in a Blockchain EnvironmentApplied Sciences10.3390/app1414636114:14(6361)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Understanding User-Perceived Security Risks and Mitigation Strategies in the Web3 EcosystemProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642291(1-22)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)DeFiTail: DeFi Protocol Inspection through Cross-Contract Execution AnalysisCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3651488(786-789)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024) Trust in context: The impact of regulation on blockchain and DeFi Regulation & Governance10.1111/rego.12637Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Who is Who on Ethereum? Account Labeling Using Heterophilic Graph Convolutional NetworkIEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems10.1109/TSMC.2023.332952054:3(1541-1553)Online publication date: Mar-2024
    • (2024)DeFiScanner: Spotting DeFi Attacks Exploiting Logic Vulnerabilities on BlockchainIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2022.322812211:2(1577-1588)Online publication date: Apr-2024
    • (2024)Bridging Two Worlds: Framework for Secure Implementation of Blockchain Oracles2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering - Companion (SANER-C)10.1109/SANER-C62648.2024.00008(12-22)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
    • (2024)QuadraCode AI: Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection with Multimodal Representation2024 33rd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)10.1109/ICCCN61486.2024.10637655(1-9)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
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