Mark Richardson @tub.

​We got word that Mark Bentley Richardson is in town, and managed to catch him for a talk here at TU this Friday (May 8th) at 17h! What better way to start the weekend than with a DeFi deep dive from Bancor's Project Lead?

​The talk, titled "An Arbitrary Mean-Rate Exchange Protocol", introduces a new mathematical framework, from which a previously unreported, generalizable, decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol emerges which ameliorates the expressive limitations of prevailing archetypes. Mark defines a Mean-of-Derivatives (MoD) Property, a first-principle predicate requiring the effective rate of any exchange to be a chosen mean of the marginal rates at the transaction's endpoints. He then presents a constructive methodology for generating bonding curves that satisfy this property in closed form and without recourse to non-elementary functions. The method defines a curve's marginal rate function as a weighted Hölder mean of user-specified boundary rates, from which the curve itself is recovered by integration. This synthesis provides a unified and analytically complete foundation for creating arbitrary mean-rate exchange protocols with precisely defined and predictable behavior.

​Mark Bentley Richardson, holding a PhD from the University of Melbourne, redirected his career from research science to DeFi in 2021, now serving as Bancor's Project Lead. Under his guidance, Bancor launched Carbon DeFi, a system that enhances user customization in decentralized exchanges by enabling strategy-specific liquidity utilization. Richardson's leadership emphasizes consistent innovation while maintaining the key principles of decentralization, user safety, and operational simplicity.