Arbitrage and the Stability of AMM Price Tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Peihao, Dahmani, Nadia, Cai, Wenqi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Li, Peihao
Dahmani, Nadia
Cai, Wenqi
author_facet Li, Peihao
Dahmani, Nadia
Cai, Wenqi
contents Automated market makers (AMMs) quote prices from pool state rather than from a limit order book. AMM pools often stay close to a reference price because arbitrageurs correct profitable mispricing. A large part of decentralized finance therefore relies on a simple economic premise: once the AMM price drifts away from the reference price, arbitrage incentives push it back. This paper studies when that premise is strong enough to guarantee block-scale stability. We model the gap between the reference price and the AMM price as a stochastic tracking error, treat arbitrage as the corrective input, and place blockchain execution inside the loop through fees, discrete blocks, transaction ordering, delays, and transaction failure. The detailed execution layer is reduced to the total successful correction confirmed in each block. Under a block-level correction condition, we prove geometric ergodicity of the tracking error and obtain explicit one-step bounds that connect tracking quality to liquidity and execution quality. We also show in a constant-product example how fees, fixed execution costs, and local liquidity map into the no-trade band and the optimal corrective trade. Finally, we build empirical proxies for the theorem quantities from realized block data and use them to organize reduced and mechanism-focused simulations whose comparative statics are consistent with the theory. The contribution is to turn a basic economic intuition behind decentralized finance into a quantitative stability statement together with a tractable calibration interface.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Arbitrage and the Stability of AMM Price Tracking
Li, Peihao
Dahmani, Nadia
Cai, Wenqi
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Systems and Control
Automated market makers (AMMs) quote prices from pool state rather than from a limit order book. AMM pools often stay close to a reference price because arbitrageurs correct profitable mispricing. A large part of decentralized finance therefore relies on a simple economic premise: once the AMM price drifts away from the reference price, arbitrage incentives push it back. This paper studies when that premise is strong enough to guarantee block-scale stability. We model the gap between the reference price and the AMM price as a stochastic tracking error, treat arbitrage as the corrective input, and place blockchain execution inside the loop through fees, discrete blocks, transaction ordering, delays, and transaction failure. The detailed execution layer is reduced to the total successful correction confirmed in each block. Under a block-level correction condition, we prove geometric ergodicity of the tracking error and obtain explicit one-step bounds that connect tracking quality to liquidity and execution quality. We also show in a constant-product example how fees, fixed execution costs, and local liquidity map into the no-trade band and the optimal corrective trade. Finally, we build empirical proxies for the theorem quantities from realized block data and use them to organize reduced and mechanism-focused simulations whose comparative statics are consistent with the theory. The contribution is to turn a basic economic intuition behind decentralized finance into a quantitative stability statement together with a tractable calibration interface.
title Arbitrage and the Stability of AMM Price Tracking
topic Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06060