Financial markets, particularly cryptocurrency markets, are characterized by high volatility and sudden price jumps, making it essential to develop models that can capture these dynamics effectively. In this paper, our focus lies on the Merton’s jump diffusion model, employing jump processes characterized by the compound Poisson process. Our primary objective is to forecast the drift and volatility of the model using a variety of methodologies. We adopt an approach that involves implementing different drift, volatility, and jump terms within the model through various machine learning techniques, traditional methods, and statistical methods on price-volume data. Additionally, we introduce a path-dependent Monte Carlo simulation to model cryptocurrency prices, taking into account the volatility and unexpected jumps in prices. The results indicate that incorporating jump processes significantly improves forecasting accuracy, especially in volatile markets. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of combining machine learning and traditional methods for more robust predictions.
Abstract The paper analyzes the cryptocurrency ecosystem at both the aggregate and individual levels to understand the factors that impact future volatility. The study uses high-frequency panel data from 2020 to 2022 to examine the relationship between several market volatility drivers, such as daily leverage, signed volatility and jumps. Several known autoregressive model specifications are estimated over different market regimes, and results are compared to equity data as a reference benchmark of a more mature asset class. The panel estimations show that the positive market returns at the high-frequency level increase price volatility, contrary to what is expected from the classical financial literature. We attributed this effect to the price dynamics over the last year of the dataset (2022) by repeating the estimation on different time spans. Moreover, the positive signed volatility and negative daily leverage positively impact the cryptocurrencies’ future volatility, unlike what emerges from the same study on a cross-section of stocks. This result signals a structural difference in a nascent cryptocurrency market that has to mature yet. Further individual-level analysis confirms the findings of the panel analysis and highlights that these effects are statistically significant and commonly shared among many components in the selected universe.
In the ever evolving landscape of decentralized finance automated market makers (AMMs) play a key role: they provide a market place for trading assets in a decentralized manner. For so-called bluechip pairs, arbitrage activity provides a major part of the revenue generation of AMMs but also a major source of loss due to the so-called informed orderflow. Finding ways to minimize those losses while still keeping uninformed trading activity alive is a major problem in the field. In this paper we will investigate the mechanics of said arbitrage and try to understand how AMMs can maximize the revenue creation or in other words minimize the losses. To that end, we model the dynamics of arbitrage activity for a concrete implementation of a pool and study its sensitivity to the choice of fee aiming to maximize the value retention. We manage to map the ensuing dynamics to that of a random walk with a specific reward scheme that provides a convenient starting point for further studies.
We develop a liquidity-sensitive multivariate volatility framework to improve the estimation of time-varying covariance structures under market frictions. We introduce two novel portfolio-level liquidity measures, liquidity jump and liquidity diffusion, which capture magnitude and volatility of liquidity fluctuation, respectively, and construct liquidity-adjusted return and volatility that reflect real-time liquidity variability. These liquidity-adjusted inputs are integrated into a VECM-DCC/ADCC-Bayesian model, allowing for conditional and posterior covariance estimation under liquidity stress. Applying this framework to portfolios of cryptocurrencies and US stocks, we find that traditional models misrepresent volatility and co-movement, while liquidity-adjusted models yield more stable and interpretable risk structures, particularly for portfolios of cryptocurrencies. The findings support the use of liquidity-adjusted multivariate models as statistically grounded tools for assessing the propagation of portfolio risk under market frictions, with implications for asset pricing, market microstructure design, and portfolio management.
We explore the adoption of graph representation learning (GRL) algorithms to investigate similarities across services offered by Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. Following existing literature, we use Ethereum transaction data to identify the DeFi building blocks. These are sets of protocol-specific smart contracts that are utilized in combination within single transactions and encapsulate the logic to conduct specific financial services such as swapping or lending cryptoassets. We propose a method to categorize these blocks into clusters based on their smart contract attributes and the graph structure of their smart contract calls. We employ GRL to create embedding vectors from building blocks and agglomerative models for clustering them. To evaluate whether they are effectively grouped in clusters of similar functionalities, we associate them with eight financial functionality categories and use this information as the target label. We find that in the best-case scenario purity reaches .888. We use additional information to associate the building blocks with protocol-specific target labels, obtaining comparable purity (.864) but higher V-Measure (.571); we discuss plausible explanations for this difference. In summary, this method helps categorize existing financial products offered by DeFi protocols, and can effectively automatize the detection of similar DeFi services, especially within protocols.
Steven Y. K. Wong, Jennifer S. K. Chan, Lamiae Azizi
Time-series with volatility clustering pose a unique challenge to uncertainty quantification (UQ) for returns forecasts. Methods for UQ such as Deep Evidential regression offer a simple way of quantifying return forecast uncertainty without the costs of a full Bayesian treatment. However, the Normal-Inverse-Gamma (NIG) prior adopted by Deep Evidential regression is prone to miscalibration as the NIG prior is assigned to latent mean and variance parameters in a hierarchical structure. Moreover, it also overparameterizes the marginal data distribution. These limitations may affect the accurate delineation of epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainties. We propose a Scale Mixture Distribution as a simpler alternative which can provide favorable complexity-accuracy trade-off and assign separate subnetworks to each model parameter. To illustrate the performance of our proposed method, we apply it to two sets of financial time-series exhibiting volatility clustering: cryptocurrencies and U.S. equities and test the performance in some ablation studies.
Yaoyue Tang, Karina Arias-Calluari, M. N. Najafi, Michael Harré · 5 authors
This paper analyses the high-frequency intraday Bitcoin dataset from 2019 to 2022. During this time frame, the Bitcoin market index exhibited two distinct periods, 2019-20 and 2021-22, characterized by an abrupt change in volatility. The Bitcoin price returns for both periods can be described by an anomalous diffusion process, transitioning from subdiffusion for short intervals to weak superdiffusion over longer time intervals. The characteristic features related to this anomalous behavior studied in the present paper include heavy tails, which can be described using a $q$-Gaussian distribution and correlations. When we sample the autocorrelation of absolute returns, we observe a power-law relationship, indicating time dependence in both periods initially. The ensemble autocorrelation of the returns decays rapidly. We fitted the autocorrelation with a power law to capture the decay and found that the second period experienced a slightly higher decay rate. The further study involves the analysis of endogenous effects within the Bitcoin time series, which are examined through detrending analysis. We found that both periods are multifractal and present self-similarity in the detrended probability density function (PDF). The Hurst exponent over short time intervals shifts from less than 0.5 ($\sim$ 0.42) in Period 1 to closer to 0.5 in Period 2 ($\sim$ 0.49), indicating that the market has gained efficiency over time.
In the burgeoning realm of cryptocurrency, social media platforms like Twitter have become pivotal in influencing market trends and investor sentiments. In our study, we leverage GPT-4 and a fine-tuned transformer-based BERT model for a multimodal sentiment analysis, focusing on the impact of emoji sentiment on cryptocurrency markets. By translating emojis into quantifiable sentiment data, we correlate these insights with key market indicators like BTC Price and the VCRIX index. Our architecture's analysis of emoji sentiment demonstrated a distinct advantage over FinBERT's pure text sentiment analysis in such predicting power. This approach may be fed into the development of trading strategies aimed at utilizing social media elements to identify and forecast market trends. Crucially, our findings suggest that strategies based on emoji sentiment can facilitate the avoidance of significant market downturns and contribute to the stabilization of returns. This research underscores the practical benefits of integrating advanced AI-driven analyses into financial strategies, offering a nuanced perspective on the interplay between digital communication and market dynamics in an academic context.
An extension of the Hawkes process, the Marked Hawkes process distinguishes itself by featuring variable jump size across each event, in contrast to the constant jump size observed in a Hawkes process without marks. While extensive literature has been dedicated to the non-parametric estimation of both the linear and non-linear Hawkes process, there remains a significant gap in the literature regarding the marked Hawkes process. In response to this, we propose a methodology for estimating the conditional intensity of the marked Hawkes process. We introduce two distinct models: \textit{Shallow Neural Hawkes with marks}- for Hawkes processes with excitatory kernels and \textit{Neural Network for Non-Linear Hawkes with Marks}- for non-linear Hawkes processes. Both these approaches take the past arrival times and their corresponding marks as the input to obtain the arrival intensity. This approach is entirely non-parametric, preserving the interpretability associated with the marked Hawkes process. To validate the efficacy of our method, we subject the method to synthetic datasets with known ground truth. Additionally, we apply our method to model cryptocurrency order book data, demonstrating its applicability to real-world scenarios.
The rapid development of information technology, especially the Internet, has facilitated users with a quick and easy way to seek information. With these convenience offered by internet services, many individuals who initially invested in gold and precious metals are now shifting into digital investments in form of cryptocurrencies. However, investments in crypto coins are filled with uncertainties and fluctuation in daily basis. This risk posed as significant challenges for coin investors that could result in substantial investment losses. The uncertainty of the value of these crypto coins is a critical issue in the field of coin investment. Forecasting, is one of the methods used to predict the future value of these crypto coins. By utilizing the models of Long Short Term Memory, Support Vector Machine, and Polynomial Regression algorithm for forecasting, a performance comparison is conducted to determine which algorithm model is most suitable for predicting crypto currency prices. The mean square error is employed as a benchmark for the comparison. By applying those three constructed algorithm models, the Support Vector Machine uses a linear kernel to produce the smallest mean square error compared to the Long Short Term Memory and Polynomial Regression algorithm models, with a mean square error value of 0.02. Keywords: Cryptocurrency, Forecasting, Long Short Term Memory, Mean Square Error, Polynomial Regression, Support Vector Machine
This research explores a relatively unexplored area of predicting cryptocurrency staking rewards, offering potential insights to researchers and investors. We investigate two predictive methodologies: a) a straightforward sliding-window average, and b) linear regression models predicated on historical data. The findings reveal that ETH staking rewards can be forecasted with an RMSE within 0.7% and 1.1% of the mean value for 1-day and 7-day look-aheads respectively, using a 7-day sliding-window average approach. Additionally, we discern diverse prediction accuracies across various cryptocurrencies, including SOL, XTZ, ATOM, and MATIC. Linear regression is identified as superior to the moving-window average for perdicting in the short term for XTZ and ATOM. The results underscore the generally stable and predictable nature of staking rewards for most assets, with MATIC presenting a noteworthy exception.
Dennis Koch, Vahidin Jeleskovic, Zahid Irshad Younas
This paper introduces a unique and valuable research design aimed at analyzing Bitcoin price volatility. To achieve this, a range of models from the Markov Switching-GARCH and Stochastic Autoregressive Volatility (SARV) model classes are considered and their out-of-sample forecasting performance is thoroughly examined. The paper provides insights into the rationale behind the recommendation for a two-stage estimation approach, emphasizing the separate estimation of coefficients in the mean and variance equations. The results presented in this paper indicate that Stochastic Volatility models, particularly SARV models, outperform MS-GARCH models in forecasting Bitcoin price volatility. Moreover, the study suggests that in certain situations, persistent simple GARCH models may even outperform Markov-Switching GARCH models in predicting the variance of Bitcoin log returns. These findings offer valuable guidance for risk management experts, highlighting the potential advantages of SARV models in managing and forecasting Bitcoin price volatility.
Forecasting speculative stock prices is essential for effective investment risk management that drives the need for the development of innovative algorithms. However, the speculative nature, volatility, and complex sequential dependencies within financial markets present inherent challenges which necessitate advanced techniques. This paper proposes a novel framework, CAB-XDE (customized attention BiLSTM-XGB decision ensemble), for predicting the daily closing price of speculative stock Bitcoin-USD (BTC-USD). CAB-XDE framework integrates a customized bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) with the attention mechanism and the XGBoost algorithm. The customized BiLSTM leverages its learning capabilities to capture the complex sequential dependencies and speculative market trends. Additionally, the new attention mechanism dynamically assigns weights to influential features, thereby enhancing interpretability, and optimizing effective cost measures and volatility forecasting. Moreover, XGBoost handles nonlinear relationships and contributes to the proposed CAB-XDE framework robustness. Additionally, the weight determination theory-error reciprocal method further refines predictions. This refinement is achieved by iteratively adjusting model weights. It is based on discrepancies between theoretical expectations and actual errors in individual customized attention BiLSTM and XGBoost models to enhance performance. Finally, the predictions from both XGBoost and customized attention BiLSTM models are concatenated to achieve diverse prediction space and are provided to the ensemble classifier to enhance the generalization capabilities of CAB-XDE. The proposed CAB-XDE framework is empirically validated on volatile Bitcoin market, sourced from Yahoo Finance and outperforms state-of-the-art models with a MAPE of 0.0037, MAE of 84.40, and RMSE of 106.14.
This paper presents a comprehensive statistical analysis of the Web3 ecosystem, comparing various Web3 tokens with traditional financial assets across multiple time scales. We examine probability distributions, tail behaviors, and other key stylized facts of the returns for a diverse range of tokens, including decentralized exchanges, liquidity pools, and centralized exchanges. Despite functional differences, most tokens exhibit well-established empirical facts, including unconditional probability density of returns with heavy tails gradually becoming Gaussian and volatility clustering. Furthermore, we compare assets traded on centralized (CEX) and decentralized (DEX) exchanges, finding that DEXs exhibit similar stylized facts despite different trading mechanisms and often divergent long-term performance. We propose that this similarity is attributable to arbitrageurs striving to maintain similar centralized and decentralized prices. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of Web3 tokens and the relationship between CEX and DEX markets, with important implications for risk management, pricing models, and portfolio construction in the rapidly evolving DeFi landscape. These results add to the growing body of literature on cryptocurrency markets and provide insights that can guide the development of more accurate models for DeFi markets.
In the realm of cryptocurrency, the prediction of Bitcoin prices has garnered substantial attention due to its potential impact on financial markets and investment strategies. This paper propose a comparative study on hybrid machine learning algorithms and leverage on enhancing model interpretability. Specifically, linear regression(OLS, LASSO), long-short term memory(LSTM), decision tree regressors are introduced. Through the grounded experiments, we observe linear regressor achieves the best performance among candidate models. For the interpretability, we carry out a systematic overview on the preprocessing techniques of time-series statistics, including decomposition, auto-correlational function, exponential triple forecasting, which aim to excavate latent relations and complex patterns appeared in the financial time-series forecasting. We believe this work may derive more attention and inspire more researches in the realm of time-series analysis and its realistic applications.
Four markets are considered: Cryptocurrencies / South American exchange rate / Spanish Banking indices and European Indices and studied using TDA (Topological Data Analysis) tools. These tools are used to predict and showcase both strengths and weakness of the current TDA tools. In this paper a new tool $L0$ norm is defined and complemented with the already existing $C1$ norm.
Economic periods and financial crises have highlighted the importance of evaluating financial markets to investors and researchers in recent decades. The asset price fluctuation is an innate quality of the market. However, fluctuations sometimes become abnormal and turn into unbridled spikes and sudden declines, causing irreversible damage to an economy and the trust of investors. In recent years, there have been severe price fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market. Some analysts have defined these fluctuations as price bubbles (i.e., economic bubbles). However, no specific definitions have yet been proposed for these price bubbles. The right-tail augmented Dickey–Fuller (RTADF) test was conducted on the time series data of 13 years (2008–2021) to analyze the presence of bubbles in the Bitcoin market. The RTADF results rejected the null hypothesis and confirmed the alternative hypothesis indicating the presence of bubbles in the Bitcoin market. In other words, there is some evidence of explosive behavior in a bubble. Moreover, the results of GSADF and SADF tests confirmed the presence of multiple bubbles in the Bitcoin market within 2008–2021.
This paper describes an architecture for predicting the price of cryptocurrencies for the next seven days using the Adaptive Network Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). Historical data of cryptocurrencies and indexes that are considered are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Dominance (BTC.D), and Ethereum Dominance (ETH.D) in a daily timeframe. The methods used to teach the data are hybrid and backpropagation algorithms, as well as grid partition, subtractive clustering, and Fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) algorithms, which are used in data clustering. The architectural performance designed in this paper has been compared with different inputs and neural network models in terms of statistical evaluation criteria. Finally, the proposed method can predict the price of digital currencies in a short time.
Accurately forecasting the direction of financial returns poses a formidable challenge, given the inherent unpredictability of financial time series. The task becomes even more arduous when applied to cryptocurrency returns, given the chaotic and intricately complex nature of crypto markets. In this study, we present a novel prediction algorithm using limit order book (LOB) data rooted in the Hawkes model, a category of point processes. Coupled with a continuous output error (COE) model, our approach offers a precise forecast of return signs by leveraging predictions of future financial interactions. Capitalizing on the non-uniformly sampled structure of the original time series, our strategy surpasses benchmark models in both prediction accuracy and cumulative profit when implemented in a trading environment. The efficacy of our approach is validated through Monte Carlo simulations across 50 scenarios. The research draws on LOB measurements from a centralized cryptocurrency exchange where the stablecoin Tether is exchanged against the U.S. dollar.
We present a comprehensive analysis of the implications of artificial latency in the Proposer-Builder Separation framework on the Ethereum network. Focusing on the MEV-Boost auction system, we analyze how strategic latency manipulation affects Maximum Extractable Value yields and network integrity. Our findings reveal both increased profitability for node operators and significant systemic challenges, including heightened network inefficiencies and centralization risks. We empirically validates these insights with a pilot that Chorus One has been operating on Ethereum mainnet. We demonstrate the nuanced effects of latency on bid selection and validator dynamics. Ultimately, this research underscores the need for balanced strategies that optimize Maximum Extractable Value capture while preserving the Ethereum network's decentralization ethos.
The objective of this paper is the construction of new indicators that can be useful to operate in the cryptocurrency market. These indicators are based on public data obtained from the blockchain network, specifically from the nodes that make up Bitcoin mining. Therefore, our analysis is unique to that network. The results obtained with numerical simulations of algorithmic trading and prediction via statistical models and Machine Learning demonstrate the importance of variables such as the hash rate, the difficulty of mining or the cost per transaction when it comes to trade Bitcoin assets or predict the direction of price. Variables obtained from the blockchain network will be called here blockchain metrics. The corresponding indicators (inspired by the “Hash Ribbon”) perform well in locating buy signals. From our results, we conclude that such blockchain indicators allow obtaining information with a statistical advantage in the highly volatile cryptocurrency market.
Vincent Gurgul, Stefan Lessmann, Wolfgang Karl Härdle
We introduce novel approaches to cryptocurrency price forecasting, leveraging Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, with a focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum. By analysing news and social media content, primarily from Twitter and Reddit, we assess the impact of public sentiment on cryptocurrency markets. A distinctive feature of our methodology is the application of the BART MNLI zero-shot classification model to detect bullish and bearish trends, significantly advancing beyond traditional sentiment analysis. Additionally, we systematically compare a range of pre-trained and fine-tuned deep learning NLP models against conventional dictionary-based sentiment analysis methods. Another key contribution of our work is the adoption of local extrema alongside daily price movements as predictive targets, reducing trading frequency and portfolio volatility. Our findings demonstrate that integrating textual data into cryptocurrency price forecasting not only improves forecasting accuracy but also consistently enhances the profitability and Sharpe ratio across various validation scenarios, particularly when applying deep learning NLP techniques. The entire codebase of our experiments is available via an online repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/crypto-forecasting-public . • NLP data from social media improve the accuracy of cryptocurrency forecasting models. • As a target variable, local extrema are a valid alternative to daily price changes. • Deep learning language models substantially outperform dictionary-based methodologies. • Both pre-trained and fine-tuned language models effectively quantify market sentiment.
We extend the application and test the performance of a recently introduced volatility prediction framework encompassing LSTM and rough volatility. Our asset class of interest is cryptocurrencies, at the beginning of the "crypto-winter" in 2022. We first show that to forecast volatility, a universal LSTM approach trained on a pool of assets outperforms traditional models. We then consider a parsimonious parametric model based on rough volatility and Zumbach effect. We obtain similar prediction performances with only five parameters whose values are non-asset-dependent. Our findings provide further evidence on the universality of the mechanisms underlying the volatility formation process.
This study investigates the influence of monetary policy and monetary policy uncertainties on Bitcoin returns, utilizing monthly data of BTC, and MPU from July 2010 to August 2023, and employing the Markov Switching Means VAR (MSM-VAR) method. The findings reveal that Bitcoin returns can be categorized into two distinct regimes: 1) regime 1 with low volatility, and 2) regime 2 with high volatility. In both regimes, an increase in MPU leads to a decline in Bitcoin returns: -0.028 in regime 1 and -0.44 in regime 2. This indicates that monetary policy uncertainty exerts a negative influence on Bitcoin returns during both downturns and upswings. Furthermore, the study explores Bitcoin's sensitivity to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decisions.