Efficiency in the markets of crypto-currencies

Abstract

We show that the level of market-efficiency in the five largest cryptocurrencies is highly time-varying. Specifically, before 2017, cryptocurrency-markets are mostly inefficient. This corroborates recent results on the matter. However, the cryptocurrency-markets become more efficient over time in the period 2017–2019. This contradicts other, more recent, results on the matter. One reason is that we apply a longer sample than previous studies. Another important reason is that we apply a robust measure of efficiency, being directly able to determine if the efficiency is significant or not. On average, Litecoin is the most efficient cryptocurrency, and Ripple being the least efficient cryptocurrency.