As an integral part of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) with automated market maker (AMM) protocols have gained massive traction with the recently revived interest in blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in general. Instead of matching the buy and sell sides, automated market makers (AMMs) employ a peer-to-pool method and determine asset price algorithmically through a so-called conservation function. To facilitate the improvement and development of AMM-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs), we create the first systematization of knowledge in this area. We first establish a general AMM framework describing the economics and formalizing the system’s state-space representation. We then employ our framework to systematically compare the top AMM protocols’ mechanics, illustrating their conservation functions, as well as slippage and divergence loss functions. We further discuss security and privacy concerns, how they are enabled by AMM-based DEXs’ inherent properties, and explore mitigating solutions. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on related work covering both DeFi and conventional market microstructure.

作为去中心化金融 (DeFi) 生态系统不可或缺的一部分，具有自动做市商 (AMM) 协议的去中心化交易所 (DEX) 随着最近人们对区块链和分布式账本技术 (DLT) 的总体兴趣重新燃起，获得了巨大的吸引力。自动做市商 (AMM) 不是匹配买卖双方，而是采用点对点方法，并通过所谓的守恒函数通过算法确定资产价格。为了促进基于 AMM 的去中心化交易所 (DEX) 的改进和发展，我们创建了该领域的第一个知识系统化。我们首先建立一个通用的 AMM 框架来描述经济学并形式化系统的状态空间表示。然后我们使用我们的框架系统地比较顶级 AMM 协议的机制，说明它们的守恒函数，以及滑移和发散损失函数。我们进一步讨论安全和隐私问题，基于 AMM 的 DEX 的固有属性如何支持它们，并探索缓解解决方案。最后，我们对涵盖 DeFi 和传统市场微观结构的相关工作进行了全面的文献回顾。