[Budabellly]

It's certainly fascinating... ETH enables a collateral-less loan, which is wild, and something I'd point towards for skeptics who "haven't seen one use case crypto/blockchain enables that couldn't be done with a client-server model".

The reason I say it verges on illicit, is that the most profitable flash-loan trades I've read about usually depend on some form of market manipulation and special knowledge about price oracles. They're not illicit in their own right, and can be a great tool for arbitrageurs I imagine.

https://www.coindesk.com/defi-exploits-flash-loans-industry-...

[1996]

> special knowledge about price oracles

I still don't get it. Can you point me to some actual examples?

Do you mean people are front running contract using data provided by oracles? I would not see that as illegal, just as removing friction coming from oracles that have too much latency.

[Budabellly]

I don't know that it's outright illegal. But manipulating the price of a token for your own gain, at someone else's expense, is illicit imo.

If I know how an oracle calculates a price for a pair, I can probably alter the oracle's value for it (with a lot of volume from your flash loan), without affecting other exchanges value for it. This lets you create arb opportunities for yourself: https://www.trustnodes.com/2020/02/15/hacker-makes-360000-et...

Here's an explanation I just googled for that includes oracle manipulation: https://hackingdistributed.com/2020/03/11/flash-loans/

Again, there are certainly legit applications of flash loans, the market is still learning. This looks like a legit triangle arb: https://medium.com/@kentmakishima/the-43k-defi-magic-trick-f...

I think these exploiters giving some of the money back to their victims testifies to the shadiness of their tactics: https://www.longhash.com/en/news/3407/Why-Do-DeFi's-%22Flash...

Front running is a whole other beast :)