Search Results

Documents authored by Rana, Ranvir


Document
ParlayMarket: Automated Market Making for Parlay-Style Joint Contracts

Authors: Ranvir Rana, Viraj Nadkarni, Niusha Moshrefi, and Pramod Viswanath

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 395, 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026)


Abstract
Prediction markets are powerful mechanisms for information aggregation, but existing designs are optimized for single-event contracts. Traders frequently express beliefs about joint outcomes - sports parlays, conditional forecasts, multi-scenario financial bets. Current platforms either prohibit such trades or rely on ad hoc mechanisms that ignore correlation structure, resulting in inefficient prices and fragmented liquidity. We introduce ParlayMarket, an automated market-maker for parlay-style joint contracts. The mechanism maintains a shared pairwise exponential-family belief state, so all base and parlay prices are marginals of one coherent distribution. This compresses the 2^M outcome space into O(M²) sufficient statistics and allows one liquidity pool to support an exponentially large family. Our main result characterizes the resulting learning and loss dynamics. Under repeated trading, prices converge to the best pairwise approximation of the true joint distribution. The induced expected market-maker loss grows at most quadratically in the number of base events, rather than exponentially in the number of listed parlays; moreover, this quadratic dependence is worst-case optimal for dense pairwise dependence, since there are O(M²) independent correlation directions to learn. Parlay trades are essential to this guarantee: they provide direct constraints on joint outcomes and reduce steady-state error relative to learning from marginal trades alone. Experiments on synthetic correlated markets and historical Kalshi combo data confirm the predicted scaling and show that the mechanism remains effective in realistic market-making settings. Our results demonstrate that combinatorial expressiveness does not require combinatorial capital.

Cite as

Ranvir Rana, Viraj Nadkarni, Niusha Moshrefi, and Pramod Viswanath. ParlayMarket: Automated Market Making for Parlay-Style Joint Contracts. In 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 395, pp. 15:1-15:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)


Copy BibTex To Clipboard

@InProceedings{rana_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2026.15,
  author =	{Rana, Ranvir and Nadkarni, Viraj and Moshrefi, Niusha and Viswanath, Pramod},
  title =	{{ParlayMarket: Automated Market Making for Parlay-Style Joint Contracts}},
  booktitle =	{8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026)},
  pages =	{15:1--15:22},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-451-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{395},
  editor =	{Kiayias, Aggelos and Kyropoulou, Maria},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.15},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-278697},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.15},
  annote =	{Keywords: Prediction markets, automated market makers, parlays, market scoring rules, online learning}
}
Document
Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups

Authors: Peiyao Sheng, Ranvir Rana, Senthil Bala, Himanshu Tyagi, and Pramod Viswanath

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 316, 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)


Abstract
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not only effects the throughput of the blockchain but also results in high gas fees for executing transactions on chain. The most successful solution for this problem is provided by optimistic rollups, Layer 2 (L2) blockchains that execute transactions outside L1 but post the transaction data on L1. The security for such L2 chains is argued, informally, under the assumption that a set of nodes will check the transaction data posted on L1 and raise an alarm (a fraud proof) if faulty transactions are detected. However, all current deployments lack a proper incentive mechanism for ensuring that these nodes will do their job "diligently", and simply rely on a cursory incentive alignment argument for security. We solve this problem by introducing an incentivized watchtower network designed to serve as the first line of defense for rollups. Our main contribution is a "Proof of Diligence" protocol that requires watchtowers to continuously provide a proof that they have verified L2 assertions and get rewarded for the same. Proof of Diligence protocol includes a carefully-designed incentive mechanism that is provably secure when watchtowers are rational actors, under a mild rational independence assumption. Our proposed system is now live on Ethereum testnet. We deployed a watchtower network and implemented Proof of Diligence for multiple optimistic rollups. We extract execution as well as inclusion proofs for transactions as a part of the bounty. Each watchtower has minimal additional computational overhead beyond access to standard L1 and L2 RPC nodes. Our watchtower network comprises of 10 different (rationally independent) EigenLayer operators, secured using restaked Ethereum and spread across three different continents, watching two different optimistic rollups for Ethereum, providing them a decentralized and trustfree first line of defense. The watchtower network can be configured to watch the batches committed by sequencer on L1, providing an approximately 3 minute (cryptoeconomically secure) finality since the additional overhead for watching is very low. This is much lower than the finality delay in the current setup where it takes about 45 minutes for state assertions on L1, and hence will not delay the finality process on L1.

Cite as

Peiyao Sheng, Ranvir Rana, Senthil Bala, Himanshu Tyagi, and Pramod Viswanath. Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 5:1-5:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)


Copy BibTex To Clipboard

@InProceedings{sheng_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2024.5,
  author =	{Sheng, Peiyao and Rana, Ranvir and Bala, Senthil and Tyagi, Himanshu and Viswanath, Pramod},
  title =	{{Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups}},
  booktitle =	{6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)},
  pages =	{5:1--5:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-345-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{316},
  editor =	{B\"{o}hme, Rainer and Kiffer, Lucianna},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.5},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-209417},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.5},
  annote =	{Keywords: blockchain, rollup, game theory, security}
}

Any Issues?
X

Feedback on the Current Page

CAPTCHA

Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted to Dagstuhl Publishing

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail