HOW DOES BLOCKCHAIN PARTICIPATION AFFECT THE CRYPTOCURRENCY MARKET?

Abstract

Taking the unique advantage of the cryptocurrency market setting, this paper examines the relationships between blockchain participation and returns, trading volume and realized volatility of main cryptocurrencies (i.e., Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin). Dissimilar to previous theoretical studies that model the influencing factors on participation, we employ the number of unique from addresses 1 as the proxy for cryptocurrency investors’ blockchain participation and further explore the impact of such participation. By using vector autoregressive (VAR) model, we find that the blockchain participation has a significant and positive impact on the next day’s trading volume and realized volatility for the main cryptocurrencies. Our results are robust to the Granger causality test and alternative measure for blockchain participation.