An agent-based analysis of commit & reveal schemes to mitigate blockchain extractable value
frontrunning, decentralized finance, agent-based model, commit and reveal mechanism
The order of transactions within blocks in Ethereum affect the results of smart contracts such as decentralized exchanges, thereby providing opportunities for malicious actors to profit at the users’ expense. These attacks contribute to increased costs, reduced legitimate transaction throughput, and potentially threaten consensus-layer security. For those reasons, numerous strategies have been proposed to counteract them, including on-chain commit & reveal mechanisms. These approaches separate transaction submission and finalization into distinct blocks while concealing crucial transaction details during the initial submission, making attacks more difficult. Expanding upon previous agent-based studies of frontrunning in decentralized finance, this dissertation aims to quantify the impact of delays inherent in commit & reveal mechanisms on price accuracy and the potential profit loss for traders due to reordering attacks that remain feasible despite these countermeasures.