Whitepaper Reading [SF] - Defi Topics: No Place to Hide & Active Liquidity On Chain

Discussion Topics

As more trading moves through private RPCs and protected submission channels, the question is how much safety those protections actually buy. No Place to Hide examines three years of activity across six chains and finds sandwich attacks against supposedly protected transactions on four of them. The exposure comes from order-flow auctions, validators, applications, reorgs, and even an RPC bug. We’ll ask what “protected” should mean when keeping a trade out of the public mempool still leaves multiple ways for attackers to see it coming, and whether protection can hold without securing the full path from wallet to execution.

We’ll also cover Active Liquidity On Chain, a study of proprietary AMMs across Solana, Base, and Monad. These venues let a single operator supply inventory and update prices without waiting for a trade, helping them avoid the stale quotes that arbitrageurs exploit in passive AMMs. The paper finds better prices for flow used as a proxy for retail trading, alongside pricing that varies by counterparty and evidence of quotes that worsen at execution. The core discussion is whether tighter spreads justify opaque pricing rules, and how aggregators should route trades when the price they see may differ from the price users receive.

Reading Overview

•    No Place to Hide: Where private transaction protections fail, and what it takes to secure the full path from wallet to execution.

•    Active Liquidity On Chain: How proprietary AMMs improve pricing, and the trade-offs around transparency, routing, and execution quality.

Full Documents

•    No Place to Hide (https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28115)

•    Active Liquidity On Chain (https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38056)

Format

•    10 minutes of silent reading to start.

•    Discussion first, with no panels.

•    Bring questions—technical depth is welcomed.

•    Short notes and key takeaways shared after the session.

About Whitepaper Reading Club

Whitepaper Reading Club is a community of 800 builders, founders, and researchers across Singapore, Malaysia, San Francisco, Lagos, Bangkok, and New York. The community meets in person every month to discuss the latest blockchain projects.

The club creates detailed, easy-to-understand summaries for each paper and has held more than 70 sessions since June 2023, covering topics from Account Abstraction, Parallel Chains, and EIPs to the Bitcoin ecosystem and AI × crypto. It is ecosystem-agnostic and not for profit, with a strong focus on projects with technical, product, or social innovations.

Dimes, our community partner, connects builders with the people, resources, and support to turn ideas into reality. Our host venue, localhost, is Dimes’ co-working and event space in downtown San Francisco, created for builders to meet, share ideas, and connect.

We’re excited to host this event with Whitepaper Reading Club.

Crypto