["pile"] flash loans

[quinn-dougherty]

Executive Summary ported from draft report

Ethereum offers flash loans because they have multi-step atomic transactions. Cardano does not have these. So in spite of Aada's claims, we are not expecting flash loans to enter the Cardano ecosystem at this time. There may be lessons from the attacks in the reports, but they are not entirely straightforward. The question is: is there anything unique introduced by the flash loan mechanism? The auditing research opportunity here is not a huge priority.

Takeaway that definitely goes into the audit

Project Ardana will be monitoring the Cardano ecosystem's evolution very closely to check if they're thinking about introducing multistep atomic transactions.

In the event of this happening, the following mitigation strategy sketches will become rather urgent.

• Onchain code only allow interop from one platform and users, not arbitrary platform
• Lending products ought to require to collateralize in one whole transaction ahead of time before.
• Block price manipulation by disallowing mid-transaction information from updating prices

[quinn-dougherty]

Matt Ho believes that flashloans can make their way to Cardano, but they'll be resilient to flashloan attacks.