Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer form of digital currency proposed in 2008. Unlike other currencies, Bitcoin does not rely on a specific institution to issue it, it is based on a specific algorithm that generates it through a large number of calculations. In some countries, government agencies, central banks and academia regard Bitcoin is a virtual currency rather than a currency. This is because of Bitcoinâs high volatility, which does not have the two basic functions of the unit of account and the store of value that are unique to the currency. In recent years, Bitcoin has seen increasing media coverage and other cryptocurrency portfolios, as well as the significant capital gains have been seen in the high volatility environment. In this paper, we shed light on the low correlation of Bitcoin with traditional investment assets, making Bitcoin a potentially high-quality source of portfolio diversification. The results of the finding suggest that Bitcoin investments offer significant diversification benefits and should be included in optimal portfolios. In addition to this, we find that hedging strategies involving gold, oil, stocks and Bitcoin significantly reduce portfolio risk.
For more than a decade, as the number and value of cryptocurrencies exploded, more and more investors flocked to the cryptocurrency market with the expectation of positive returns. The price of cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, is extremely volatile. As a result, there is a great need to develop an accurate price prediction model to assist investors in making decisions and profit. This paper focuses on developing an LSTM-based prediction model for Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and Solana cryptocurrency price prediction and calculating their RMSE and MAPE. Furthermore, four models are compared using this calculated MAPE. Based on the comparison results, the impact of cryptocurrency volatility, liquidity, and technology level on the accuracy of the LSTM prediction model is also examined. The paper concludes that the LSTM model can predict the price of Bitcoin more accurately because Bitcoin has the least volatility, the most liquidity and uses the oldest but most secure consensus mechanism.
In today's world, with the internet and finance closely integrated, the global-ization of cryptocurrency has deepened, prompting people to pay more atten-tion to the impact of cryptocurrency on the entire financial market. This pa-per provides a comprehensive review of relevant literature from five aspects: the development of cryptocurrency, price changes, the impact of cryptocur-rency on the stock market, the impact of cryptocurrency on the banking in-dustry, and the currency and commodity characteristics of cryptocurrency. The author also compares the price curves (in USD) of the S&P 500, ETH, and BTC from March 21, 2022, to March 21, 2023, and hopes to gain in-sights into the relationship between stocks and cryptocurrencies. Our re-search shows that the emergence of cryptocurrency has had a significant im-pact on the financial market, particularly in the banking industry. Although the emergence of cryptocurrency has added vitality to the financial market and increased investment options, the instability of cryptocurrency has also brought risks to investors. As the cryptocurrency market continues to ex-pand, policymakers and investors need to understand its potential impact on traditional financial instruments and the broader economy.
Abstract The cryptocurrency crash on the 5th of September, 2018, resulted in price decreases in 95 of the 100 leading digital currencies. We obtained millisecond data of some of the more prominent cryptocurrenciesâbitcoin, ethereum, ripple, bitcoin cash and eosâand some of the smaller cryptocurrenciesâneo, nem, omg, tezos and liskâthat were most affected in the crash and investigated what caused the digital market to collapse. We find that the behaviour of the more prominent cryptocurrencies and bitcoin, in particular, was the dominant factor behind the crash. We also find that smaller cryptocurrencies followed the behaviour of the larger ones in the crash. Furthermore, our empirical findings show that the trading behaviour of cryptocurrency traders (CTs) did not trigger the digital market crash. We propose the introduction of a single-cryptocurrency circuit breaker most prominent largest cryptocurrencyâbitcoinâthat will halt trading during market disruptions.
This article is a study on the security of decentralized finance. We summarize the background and application of decentralized finance, as well as the development history and latest research of decentralized finance. Moreover, we propose a classification framework for existing various DeFi DApps. We also manually collected attacks against decentralized financial applications and classified them by category. Through some case studies, we give some best practices for practitioners in decentralized finance industries to avoid or defend against attacks.
This article reveals a specific category of solutions for the 1+1 variable order (VO) nonlinear fractional Fokker-Planck equations. These solutions are formulated using VO q-Gaussian functions, granting them significant versatility in their application to various real-world systems, such as financial economy areas spanning from conventional stock markets to cryptocurrencies. The VO q-Gaussian functions provide a more robust expression for the distribution function of price returns in real-world systems. Additionally, we analyzed the temporal evolution of the anomalous characteristic exponents derived from our study, which are associated with the long-term (power-law) memory in time series data and autocorrelation patterns.
Lai Ting, M. M. Abd ElâRaouf, M. E. Bakr, Arwa M. Alsahangiti
Statistical modeling and forecasting are very important for decision-making in any field of life. This paper has two major objectives, namely, statistical modeling and forecasting of real phenomena. For covering the first aim (i.e., statistical modeling), we introduce a new probabilistic model. The new model is introduced by mixing the Dagum distribution with the weighted TX family approach. The proposed model is called the weighted TX Dagum distribution and possesses heavy-tailed characteristics. The new model is illustrated by analyzing real-life data related to Bitcoin prices. To cover the second aim (i.e., forecasting), we take into account six macroeconomic and financial indicators to investigate their impact on Bitcoin prices such as the Adaptive least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Alasso), elastic net, and minimax concave penalty. After analyzing the data, it is found that Alasso and MCP have retained all the included predictors, except import, while Enet holds all the predictors. The root means square error and mean absolute error associated with MCP are lower than Alasso and Enet, which reveals that MCP fits the data very well as compared to rival methods.
Esther Cabezas-Rivas, Felipe SĂĄnchez, Isaac Tormo-Xaixo
The aim of this paper is to analyse the Bitcoin in order to shed some light on its nature and behaviour. We select 9 cryptocurrencies that account for almost 75\% of total market capitalisation and compare their evolution with that of a wide variety of traditional assets: commodities with spot and futures contracts, treasury bonds, stock indices, growth and value stocks. Fractal geometry will be applied to carry out a careful statistical analysis of the performance of the Bitcoin returns. As a main conclusion, we have detected a high degree of persistence in its prices, which decreases the efficiency but increases its predictability. Moreover, we observe that the underlying technology influences price dynamics, with fully decentralised cryptocurrencies being the only ones to exhibit self-similarity features at any time scale.
The pandemic has caused enormous economic costs by affecting banks, governments and financial markets.In this context, the main purpose of this paper is to show that cryptocurrencies have become one of the most traded financial assets in the last decade.The overall objective pursued in the paper was the major effect on the global economy and financial markets that the COVID-19 Pandemic had and which was the first real global shock since the first cryptocurrency was launched in 2009 until now.Natural disasters and pandemics are a source of contagion in global financial markets and an emerging line of research.Financial contagion can be the result of both financial and non-financial events, but in both cases, assessments require defining a timeframe.
With the rapid development of cryptocurrencies, the volatility characteristics of their yields have received more and more attention. At the same time, many empirical studies show that the GARCH family model is more effective in describing the volatility of financial time series. Firstly, this paper briefly introduces the research background of cryptocurrency and the research method using GARCH model. Next, the daily rate of return is calculated and descriptive statistical analysis is carried out on the collected closing price data of cryptocurrency, and on this basis, the GARCH model is constructed for empirical test to explore the volatility characteristics of its rate of return. Then the corresponding research conclusions and relevant policy recommendations are given.
Methodologies to infer financial networks from the price series of speculative assets vary, however, they generally involve bivariate or multivariate predictive modelling to reveal causal and correlational structures within the time series data. The required model complexity intimately relates to the underlying market efficiency, where one expects a highly developed and efficient market to display very few simple relationships in price data. This has spurred research into the applications of complex nonlinear models for developed markets. However, it remains unclear if simple models can provide meaningful and insightful descriptions of the dependency and interconnectedness of the rapidly developed cryptocurrency market. Here we show that multivariate linear models can create informative cryptocurrency networks that reflect economic intuition, and demonstrate the importance of high-influence nodes. The resulting network confirms that node degree, a measure of influence, is significantly correlated to the market capitalisation of each coin ($Ď=0.193$). However, there remains a proportion of nodes whose influence extends beyond what their market capitalisation would imply. We demonstrate that simple linear model structure reveals an inherent complexity associated with the interconnected nature of the data, supporting the use of multivariate modelling to prevent surrogate effects and achieve accurate causal representation. In a reductive experiment we show that most of the network structure is contained within a small portion of the network, consistent with the Pareto principle, whereby a fraction of the inputs generates a large proportion of the effects. Our results demonstrate that simple multivariate models provide nontrivial information about cryptocurrency market dynamics, and that these dynamics largely depend upon a few key high-influence coins.
Unlike traditional currencies that rely on centralized such as banks or governments, cryptocurrencies have become popular due to its decentralized transactions. Decentralization takes advantage of no requirement for intermediaries, thus reducing transaction fees and processing times. However, investing in cryptocurrencies incurs risks and uncertainties due to price volatility and rapid changes. The fact that prediction of asset prices is complex due to the influence of multiple factors on price movements. This paper studied the technical factor to analyse the short-term returns of Ethereum (ETH) in the periods of 1-10 days. The historical data containing ETH closing price are collected from CoinGecko. The twenty-two indicators are chosen from Momentum, Volatility, and Sentiment factors as candidates to provide valuable insights in market trends. By calculating various indicators based on past closing prices, this study utilizes XGBoost, a powerful boosted decision trees ensemble, to discover patterns in previous trading. The model performance is evaluated using the multi-class AUC-ROC metric, which measures the accuracy of predicting three types of ETH returns: Downtrend, Sideway, and Uptrend. The results show that the models achieve accuracy scores ranging from 0.65 to 0.67. Moreover, the study emphasizes the importance of considering momentum indicators when making investment decisions in Ethereum. Keywordsâcryptocurrency investment, technical factor, Ethereum, XGBoost, machine learning
Financial markets are complex, evolving dynamic systems. Due to their irregularity, financial time series forecasting is regarded as a rather challenging task. In recent years, artificial neural network applications in finance for such tasks as pattern recognition, classification, and time series forecasting have dramatically increased. The objective of this paper is to present this versatile framework and attempt to use it to predict the stock return series of four public-listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Our findings coincide with those of Burton Malkiel in his book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street; no conclusive evidence is found that our proposed models can predict the stock return series better than that of a random walk.
Muhammad Mahmudul Karim, Md Hakim Ali, Larisa Yarovaya, Md Hamid Uddin ¡ 5 authors
Implied volatility has consistently demonstrated its reliability as a superior estimator of the expected short-term volatility of underlying assets. In this study, we employ the newly constructed robust model-free implied volatility (MFIV) indices for Bitcoin and Ethereum (BitVol and EthVol) to explore the asymmetric return-volatility relationship of these cryptocurrencies through the lens of behavioral finance theories. Utilizing the asymmetric quantile regression model (QRM) and the Non-linear ARDL (NARDL) approach, our results reveal a notable difference from equities. Both positive and negative return shocks in the cryptocurrency market lead to an increase in volatility. However, during high volatility regimes, positive (negative) return shocks exert a more substantial impact on positive innovations of volatility for Bitcoin (Ethereum) compared to negative (positive) return shocks. The degree of asymmetry steadily intensifies as we progress from medium to uppermost quantiles of the volatility distribution. These observed phenomena can be attributed to behavioral aspects among market participants, including noise trading, behavioral biases, and fear of missing out (FOMO). Our findings hold significant implications for various aspects of cryptocurrency trading, portfolio hedging strategies, volatility derivatives pricing, and risk management.
Abstract The growing attention on cryptocurrencies has led to increasing research on digital stock markets. Approaches and tools usually applied to characterize standard stocks have been applied to the digital ones. Among these tools is the identification of processes of market fluctuations. Being interesting stochastic processes, the usual statistical methods are appropriate tools for their reconstruction. There, besides chance, the description of a behavioural component shall be present whenever a deterministic pattern is ever found. Markov approaches are at the leading edge of this endeavour. In this paper, Markov chains of orders one to eight are considered as a way to forecast the dynamics of three major cryptocurrencies. It is accomplished using an empirical basis of intra-day returns. Besides forecasting, we investigate the existence of eventual long-memory components in each of those stochastic processes. Results show that predictions obtained from using the empirical probabilities are better than random choices.
Cryptocurrencies have become a popular and widely researched topic of interest in recent years for investors and scholars. In order to make informed investment decisions, it is essential to comprehend the factors that impact cryptocurrency prices and to identify risky cryptocurrencies. This paper focuses on analyzing historical data and using artificial intelligence algorithms on on-chain parameters to identify the factors affecting a cryptocurrency's price and to find risky cryptocurrencies. We conducted an analysis of historical cryptocurrencies' on-chain data and measured the correlation between the price and other parameters. In addition, we used clustering and classification in order to get a better understanding of a cryptocurrency and classify it as risky or not. The analysis revealed that a significant proportion of cryptocurrencies (39%) disappeared from the market, while only a small fraction (10%) survived for more than 1000 days. Our analysis revealed a significant negative correlation between cryptocurrency price and maximum and total supply, as well as a weak positive correlation between price and 24-hour trading volume. Moreover, we clustered cryptocurrencies into five distinct groups using their on-chain parameters, which provides investors with a more comprehensive understanding of a cryptocurrency when compared to those clustered with it. Finally, by implementing multiple classifiers to predict whether a cryptocurrency is risky or not, we obtained the best f1-score of 76% using K-Nearest Neighbor.
Abstract Bitcoin (BTC) perpetual futures contracts are highly leveraged speculative trading instruments with daily market trading of $45 Billion. BTC perpetual futures are derivative contracts, which depend upon the underlying BTC SPOT (current) price. Pricing perpetual futures fairly is hard, using traditional arbitrage arguments, because of the volatile nature of the so called funding rate, which is used as the replacement of risk free rate in the Cryptocurrency market. This work presents a novel technique for pricing BTC futures contracts using conditional volatility and mean models. Intraâday highâfrequency futures' return volatility and mean are modelled using different ML and econometric techniques. A comparison is made using statistical measures to find the model that best captures the intraâday conditional mean and volatility. Exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity is shown to be an almost unbiased predictor of intraâday volatility, while a constant autoregressive moving average (0, 0) model best captures the conditional mean of the returns. A market directional high frequency trading algorithm is developed using the volatility and mean models. The algorithm first prices the futures contract at some future point of time using the volatility and mean regression models. Next, the slope between the current futures price and the expected price are used to predict the market direction. A long or short position is taken depending upon the expected market direction movement. Extensive backâtesting results show absolute returns of 1500%â8000% depending upon the transaction fees and leverage used. On average, the market direction is predicted correctly 85% of the time by the best model. Finally, the trading technique is market neutral, in that it gives large positive returns, with low SD, in both bull and bear markets.
Despite the growing literature on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we know relatively little about who are involved in trading, transacting and using these assets and how they behave. Examining millions of Bitcoin transaction records, we show that less than 1% of Bitcoin users contribute to more than 95% of the market volumes. These âwhalesâ are often associated with strategic trading/transaction volumes, market reactions and timing patterns. Using K-means clustering on a comprehensive transaction dataset, we establish a typology of traders by learning their trading exchange patterns, strategies and impact risk and market microstructure. Our approach âlearnsâ and identifies five distinct groups or types of Bitcoin users, which are somewhat, though not entirely, comparable to popular categorisations used in conventional market such as fundamental, technical, retail and institutional traders as well as market makers. Four of these groups present distinguishable trading patterns with a strong impact on liquidity provision and trading signals.
Historically, gold and silver have played distinct roles in traditional monetary systems. While gold has primarily been revered as a superior store of value, prompting individuals to hoard it, silver has commonly been used as a medium of exchange. As the financial world evolves, the emergence of cryptocurrencies has introduced a new paradigm of value and exchange. However, the store-of-value characteristic of these digital assets remains largely uncharted. Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, once likened Bitcoin to gold and Litecoin to silver. To validate this analogy, our study employs several metrics, including unspent transaction outputs (UTXO), spent transaction outputs (STXO), Weighted Average Lifespan (WAL), CoinDaysDestroyed (CDD), and public on-chain transaction data. Furthermore, we've devised trading strategies centered around the Price-to-Utility (PU) ratio, offering a fresh perspective on crypto-asset valuation beyond traditional utilities. Our back-testing results not only display trading indicators for both Bitcoin and Litecoin but also substantiate Lee's metaphor, underscoring Bitcoin's superior store-of-value proposition relative to Litecoin. We anticipate that our findings will drive further exploration into the valuation of crypto assets. For enhanced transparency and to promote future research, we've made our datasets available on Harvard Dataverse and shared our Python code on GitHub as open source.
The most popular cryptocurrency used worldwide is bitcoin. Many everyday folks and investors are now investing in bitcoin. However, it becomes quite difficult to evaluate or foresee the price of bitcoin. The price of bitcoin is extremely difficult to forecast due to its swings. By this point, machine learning has developed a number of models to examine the price behaviour of bitcoin using time series data. The digital money, a different type of payment developed utilising encryption methods, is difficult to forecast. By utilising encryption technology, cryptocurrencies may act as both a medium of exchange and a virtual accounting system. To estimate the values of a future time sequence, this work introduces a deep learning-based technique for time series forecasting that treats the current data as time series and extracts the key traits of the past. To overcome the shortcomings of conventional production forecasting, three algorithms-auto-regressive integrated moving averages (ARIMA), long-short-term memory (LSTM) network, and FB-prophet-were investigated and contrasted. We compared the models using historical bitcoin data of past eight years, from 2012 to 2020. The âFB-prophetâ model, which is significant, catches variation that might draw attention and avert possible problems.
Mingzhe Wei, Ioannis Kyriakou, Georgios Sermpinis, Charalampos Stasinakis
Abstract This study explores the effectiveness of technical and fundamental analysis in predicting and trading the returns of 12 cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Dash, Cardano, Avalanche, Binance Coin, Dogecoin, Polkadot, Litecoin, Terra and Solana. A universe of 7846 technical rules, five log moving averageâbased ratios and 59 fundamental factors are used to test predictability and profitability through the Lucky Factors methodology and Superior Predictive Ability test. We observe predictability for a small set of technical and fundamental rules, while only the shortâterm log moving averageâbased ratio and Hashrate Index demonstrate genuine inâsample and outâofâsample profitability. Our findings question the value of both technical and fundamental analysis on cryptocurrencies.
In this paper, a hybrid of a Wavelet DecompositionâGeneralised Auto-Regressive Conditional HeteroscedasticityâExtreme Value Theory (WD-ARMA-GARCH-EVT) model is applied to estimate the Value at Risk (VaR) of BitCoin (BTC/USD) and the South African Rand (ZAR/USD). The aim is to measure and compare the riskiness of the two currencies. New and improved estimation techniques for VaR have been suggested in the last decade in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. This paper aims to provide an improved alternative to the already existing statistical tools in estimating a currency VaR empirically. Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) and two mother wavelet filters on the returns series are considered in this paper, viz., the Haar and Daubechies (d4). The findings show that BitCoin/USD is riskier than ZAR/USD since it has a higher VaR per unit invested in each currency. At the 99% significance level, BitCoin/USD has average values of VaR of 2.71% and 4.98% for the WD-ARMA-GARCH-GPD and WD-ARMA-GARCH-GEVD models, respectively; and this is slightly higher than the respective 2.69% and 3.59% for the ZAR/USD. The average BitCoin/USD returns of 0.001990 are higher than ZAR/USD returns of â0.000125. These findings are consistent with the mean-variance portfolio theory, which suggests a higher yield for riskier assets. Based on the p-values of the Kupiec likelihood ratio test, the hybrid model adequacy is largely accepted, as p-values are greater than 0.05, except for the WD-ARMA-GARCH-GEVD models at a 99% significance level for both currencies. The findings are helpful to financial risk practitioners and forex traders in formulating their diversification and hedging strategies and ascertaining the risk-adjusted capital requirement to be set aside as a cushion in the event of the occurrence of an actual loss.