The research of Advait Jayant

Solo paper · SSRN 4610162 · October 2023 · 85pages · cited by 5

The Economics of Wash Trading

What an 85-page study of NFT markets says about fake volume, token incentives, and whether manipulation actually works.

Papers and reports

• The State of Edge AI: The Report and What It Got Right

  Written before on-device AI was a platform feature: why cloud-only intelligence hits latency, privacy, and bandwidth walls.

  Report
• Beyond IPOs: The Cyclical Journey from Private to Public and Back Again

  Why do firms leave the public markets they fought to enter? A study of 2,585 companies on the private-to-public-to-private cycle.

  Working paper
• The AiFi Thesis: Financing AI Compute as an Asset Class

  The argument that AI compute stops being a cloud line item and becomes something capital markets finance directly. Then Oracle, Blackstone, and AWS made it look obvious.

  Report

Explainers and methods

• What Is Wash Trading? Definition, Mechanics, and Why It Persists

  A trader sells an asset to themselves and the tape prints real-looking volume. Here is how the oldest manipulation in finance works, and why it refuses to die.

  Explainer
• NFT Markets: Structure, Efficiency, and Manipulation

  Every trade is public, yet the headline numbers routinely lie. What the structure of NFT markets does to prices, volume, and trust.

  Explainer
• NFT Wash Trading: Scale, Motives, and What the Data Shows

  On some days, most of the reported NFT volume never involved two real people. The data on who wash trades, why, and what it changes.

  Explainer
• How to Detect Wash Trading: Methods That Hold Up

  You cannot subpoena a wallet. Detection on public blockchains leans on graph structure, funding trails, and statistics instead.

  Methods
• Is Wash Trading Illegal? The Rules in Equities, Crypto, and NFTs

  In regulated futures and equities the answer has been yes since 1936. In crypto and NFTs the answer is: increasingly, and retroactively.

  Law
• LooksRare and Token Incentives: A Natural Experiment in Wash Trading

  Pay people per dollar of volume and they will manufacture dollars of volume. What LooksRare taught us about incentive design.

  Case study
• Crypto Wash Trading: How Exchanges Manufactured Their Own Volume

  In NFT markets traders faked volume for rewards. On centralised crypto exchanges, the house often faked it for itself.

  Explainer
• Wash Trading vs Wash Sale: Two Different Things With One Name

  One is a manipulation offence, the other a tax rule. Confusing them changes what is illegal, who enforces it, and what it costs you.

  Disambiguation
• Wash Trading Examples: Five Episodes That Show How It Works

  From 1920s stock pools to trade-to-earn NFT loops: five concrete episodes, what each manipulator wanted, and how each was caught.

  Case studies
• Fake Trading Volume: How to Read Market Numbers Without Being Fooled

  Volume is the most quoted and least verified number in markets. A working guide to reading it like an auditor instead of a mark.

  Explainer
• NFT Market Manipulation: The Complete Taxonomy

  Wash trading is the headline act, but thin NFT markets invite a whole repertoire. A field taxonomy, with the evidence for each move.

  Explainer
• Trade-to-Earn: Why Paying for Volume Buys You Wash Trading

  Every incentive is a price on a behaviour. Trade-to-earn priced the one behaviour a single actor can manufacture without limit.

  Mechanism design

The complete authored body of work, newest first within each group.

About the author

Advait Jayant researches market microstructure and manipulation in crypto and NFT markets. His solo-authored paper The Economics of Wash Trading (SSRN 4610162) has been cited in the Journal of Banking & Finance, the European Journal of Finance, and an NBER working paper. He is an alumnus of London Business School, where he completed two master’s degrees (an M.Res. in Business and Management Studies and a Master of Analytics and Management) and was enrolled in the PhD programme, and holds a Computer Science degree from BITS Pilani. He works across AI infrastructure, compute markets, and crypto market structure.