Any paper, describes one idea for something you could do (or not do) in the crypto space. It has to be something that could only exist because of blockchain technology (transparency, decentralized, censorship resistant).
Topic Ideas:
1. Tracing Bitcoin Transactions
2. Something with MEV
3. POW versus POS versus ?
4. Lending pool leverage? Deposit high APY, borrow low APY? What are the risks?
5. Cross chain transactions
6. Decentralized exchanges? What are the differences between each one and between them and CEXs? Risks? Benefits?
7. Layer 2: Bitcoin’s Lightning versus Ethereum solutions?
8. Governance proposals?
9. An improvement on algorithmic stable coins? A way to break the peg? (Basis, MakerDao, etc NOT USDC/Tether)
10. When does the 51% attack assumption not hold? Selfish mining, political attacks, cross chain attacks. Including forking blockchains, tokens, contracts.
12. An analysis of different betting platforms? How to break a betting platform? Improvements on a betting platform?
13. A history of different types of digital currencies (that came before bitcoin) and how they differed from bitcoin. Hashcash, bitgold, etc
What were the motivations for all the previous inventions? Which shoulders did Satoshi stand upon? What was Satoshi’s innovation?
14. Vampire attacks and other economic attacks to take users from other dApps. Which app would you attack? What would you change?
15. Pros and cons of ETH 2.0? What is it? Why? When? How? Pros? Cons?
