Over the past decade, the blockchain technology and its Bitcoin cryptocurrency have received considerable attention. Bitcoin has experienced significant price swings in daily and long-term valuations. In this paper, we propose a partial differential equation (PDE) model on the bitcoin transaction network for predicting bitcoin price. Through analysis of bitcoin subgraphs or chainlets, the PDE model captures the influence of transaction patterns on bitcoin price over time and combines the effect of all chainlet clusters. In addition, Google Trends Index is incorporated to the PDE model to reflect the effect of bitcoin market sentiment. The experiment shows that the average accuracy of daily bitcoin price prediction is 0.82 for 362 consecutive days in 2017. The results demonstrate the PDE model is capable of predicting bitcoin price. The paper is the first attempt to apply a PDE model to the bitcoin transaction network for predicting bitcoin price.
In today’s era of big data, deep learning and artificial intelligence have formed the backbone for cryptocurrency portfolio optimization. Researchers have investigated various state of the art machine learning models to predict Bitcoin price and volatility. Machine learning models like recurrent neural network (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) have been shown to perform better than traditional time series models in cryptocurrency price prediction. However, very few studies have applied sequence models with robust feature engineering to predict future pricing. In this study, we investigate a framework with a set of advanced machine learning forecasting methods with a fixed set of exogenous and endogenous factors to predict daily Bitcoin prices. We study and compare different approaches using the root mean squared error (RMSE). Experimental results show that the gated recurring unit (GRU) model with recurrent dropout performs better than popular existing models. We also show that simple trading strategies, when implemented with our proposed GRU model and with proper learning, can lead to financial gain.
We propose factor models for the cross-section of daily cryptoasset returns and provide source code for data downloads, computing risk factors and backtesting them out-of-sample. In "cryptoassets" we include all cryptocurrencies and a host of various other digital assets (coins and tokens) for which exchange market data is available. Based on our empirical analysis, we identify the leading factor that appears to strongly contribute into daily cryptoasset returns. Our results suggest that cross-sectional statistical arbitrage trading may be possible for cryptoassets subject to efficient executions and shorting.
In an economy with asymmetric information, the smart contract in the blockchain protocol mitigates uncertainty. Since, as a new trading platform, the blockchain triggers segmentation of market and differentiation of agents in both the sell and buy sides of the market, it recomposes the asymmetric information and generates spreads in asset price and quality between itself and a traditional platform. We show that marginal innovation and sophistication of the smart contract have non-monotonic effects on the trading value in the blockchain platform, its fundamental value, the price of cryptocurrency, and consumers' welfare. Moreover, a blockchain manager who controls the level of the innovation of the smart contract has an incentive to keep it lower than the first best when the underlying information asymmetry is not severe, leading to welfare loss for consumers.