Call for contributors for a paper on DeFi liquidations...
Liquidator roles have changed drastically since the addition of tokenised assets as DeFi collateral.
Originally coordinators of infrastructure, they are now expected to provide balance sheet to absorb market and credit risk.
The problem is that DeFi protocols have been built assuming assets can be sold instantly to a willing buyer. Whilst risk managers have taken this into account somewhat with LTVs, the protocol design has neglected the liquidator's need for a haircut to warehouse these risky assets.
Our calls with leading liquidators this week confirmed what we suspected: most are unaware that protocols have hard constraints on the discounts that can be applied to collateral.
This means that a slightly unhealthy position in a tokenised fund is unlikely to find any bidders, and will instead sit idle in the market.
It is also possible that under certain conditions an asset can never be liquidated, as the maximum discount available is simply not enough for any rational actor.
Different lending protocols have different constraints, but we found that in general none were well suited to clearing tokenised assets and funds in their default configuration.
Some DeFi lending protocol teams, as well as some risk managers, have been aware of this issue and have been working on fixes.
In talking to industry practitioners, one recurring theme was that levered credit positions rarely (if at all) got liquidated. The liquidation business for tokenised assets was therefore a low priority for most would-be liquidators, despite a surge in interest earlier this year.
What this means is that for these assets, liquidators are relied upon to provide a service that is objectively negative expected value for them.
We expect that some of the largest market operators, Aave for example, can justify this position as a service. But it gives reason to believe that the majority cannot, or would not, in a big market sell-off.
The incentives are skewed against them, as being a liquidator in such conditions is effectively being a charity.
We consider any third-party agreements (SLAs) with liquidators under such conditions to be largely spurious unless there are significant protocol changes: they are effectively deep out-of-the-money uncleared put options.
This concerns us as retail exposure to DeFi increases through exchanges, PSPs and neobanks. It represents a critical fragility vector.
Link to the GitHub repo below. It's still a draft, but we've spent about a week tidying it up so that it's ready for outside reviewers and contributions.