High-Frequency Jump Analysis of the Bitcoin Market*

Sustainability

Given that there are both continuous and discontinuous components in the movement of asset prices, existing asset pricing models that assume only continuous price movements should be revised. In this paper, we explore the features of jumps, which are discontinuous movements, by examining Bitcoin pricing. First, we identify jumps in the Bitcoin price on a daily basis, applying a non-parametric methodology and then break down the Bitcoin total rate of return into a jump rate of return and a continuous rate of return. In our empirical analysis, price jumps turn out to be independent of volatility. Moreover, the jumps in the Bitcoin price do not appear at regular intervals; rather, they tend to be concentrated in clusters during special periods, implying that once an economic crisis occurs, the crisis will last for a long time due to contagion effects and the economy will take a considerable amount of time to recover fully. Further, the contribution of the jump rate of return to the tot...

arXiv: General Finance, 2019

Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native tokens among participants, or the exchange of such tokens for fiat currencies in markets external to these public ledgers. The availability of their complete historical bookkeeping opens up the possibility of understanding the relationship between aggregated users' behaviour and the cryptocurrency pricing in exchange markets. This paper analyses the properties of the transaction network of Bitcoin. We consider four different representations of it, over a period of nine years since the Bitcoin creation and involving 16 million users and 283 million transactions. By analysing these networks, we show the existence of causal relationships between Bitcoin price movements and changes of its transaction network topology. Our results reveal the interplay between structural quantities, indicative of the collective behaviour of Bitcoin users, and price movements, showing that, during price drops, the system is charact...

Bitcoin has received much investor attention in recent years, however, there remains a lot of scepticism and lack of understanding of this cryptocurrency. We contribute to the growing literature of Bitcoin by examining the intraday variables of the leading Bitcoin exchange with the highest information share from 1 st November 2014 to 31 st October 2016 to reveal the intraday stylized facts of Bitcoin and also study the intraday interaction between returns, volume, bid-ask spread and volatility. Employing GMT-stamped tick data aggregated to the 5-mintuely frequency, we find that volume, bid-ask spread and volatility all experience n-shaped patterns throughout the day which suggests that European and North American traders are the main drivers of Bitcoin trading and volatility. It also suggests that volatility and the bid-ask spread are highly related as suggested by Roll (1984), which is probably due to the lack of market makers in Bitcoin markets. We also find that all intraday variables are highly correlated, possess significant lead-lag relationships and there is significant bilateral Granger causality.

Risks, 2019

The study of connectedness is key to assess spillover effects and identify lead-lagrelationships among market exchanges trading the same asset. By means of an extension of Dieboldand Yilmaz (2012) econometric connectedness measures, we examined the relationships of five majorBitcoin exchange platforms during two periods of main interest: the 2017 surge in prices and the 2018decline. We concluded that Bitfinex and Gemini are leading exchanges in terms of return spillovertransmission during the analyzed time-frame, while Bittrexs act as a follower. We also found thatconnectedness of overall returns fell substantially right before the Bitcoin price hype, whereas itleveled out during the period the down market period. We confirmed that the results are robust withregards to the modeling strategies.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2020

This study investigates bubbles and crashes in the cryptocurrency market. In particular, using the log-periodic power law, we estimate the critical time of bubbles in the Bitcoin market. The results indicate that Bitcoin bubbles clearly exist, and our forecast of critical times can be verified with high accuracy. We further claim that bubbles could originate from the mining process, investor sentiment, global economic trend, and even regulation. For policy makers, the findings suggest the necessity of monitoring the signatures of bubbles and their progress in the market place.

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management

This paper investigates the role of the frequency of price overreactions in the cryptocurrency market in the case of BitCoin over the period 2013-2018. Specifically, it uses a static approach to detect overreactions and then carries out hypothesis testing by means of a variety of statistical methods (both parametric and non-parametric) including ADF tests, Granger causality tests, correlation analysis, regression analysis with dummy variables, ARIMA and ARMAX models, neural net models, and VAR models. Specifically, the hypotheses tested are whether or not the frequency of overreactions (i) is informative about Bitcoin price movements (H1) and (ii) exhibits no seasonality (H2). On the whole, the results suggest that it can provide useful information to predict price dynamics in the cryptocurrency market and for designing trading strategies (H1 cannot be rejected), whilst there is no evidence of seasonality (H2 cannot be rejected).

Forecasting

This study aims to forecast extreme fluctuations of Bitcoin returns. Bitcoin is the first decentralized and the largest, in terms of capitalization, cryptocurrency. A well-timed and precise forecast of extreme changes in Bitcoin returns is key to market participants since they may trigger large-scale selling or buying strategies that may crucially impact the cryptocurrency markets. We term the instances of extreme Bitcoin movement as ‘spikes’. In this paper, spikes are defined as the returns instances that outreach a two-standard deviations band around the mean value. Instead of the unconditional historic standard deviation that is usually used, in this paper, we utilized a GARCH(p,q) model to derive the conditional standard deviation. We claim that the conditional standard deviation is a more suitable measure of on-the-spot risk than the overall standard deviation. The forecasting operation was performed using the support vector machines (SVM) methodology from machine learning. The...

We investigate how distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other disruptions affect the Bitcoin ecosystem. In particular, we investigate the impact of shocks on trading activity at the leading Mt. Gox exchange between April 2011 and November 2013. We find that following DDoS attacks on Mt. Gox, the number of large trades on the exchange fell sharply. In particular, the distribution of the daily trading volume becomes less skewed (fewer big trades) and had smaller kurtosis on days following DDoS attacks. The results are robust to alternative specifications, as well as to restricting the data to activity prior to March 2013, i.e., the period before the first large appreciation in the price of and attention paid to Bitcoin.

Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science

We analyze tick-by-tick data representing major cryptocurrencies traded on some different cryptocurrency trading platforms. We focus on such quantities like the inter-transaction times, the number of transactions in time unit, the traded volume, and volatility. We show that the inter-transaction times show long-range power-law autocorrelations. These lead to multifractality expressed by the right-side asymmetry of the singularity spectra [Formula: see text] indicating that the periods of increased market activity are characterized by richer multifractality compared to the periods of quiet market. We also show that neither the stretched exponential distribution nor the power-law-tail distribution is able to model universally the cumulative distribution functions of the quantities considered in this work. For each quantity, some data sets can be modeled by the former and some data sets by the latter, while both fail in other cases. An interesting, yet difficult to account for, observa...

ArXiv, 2018

The functioning of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin relies on the open availability of the entire history of its transactions. This makes it a particularly interesting socio-economic system to analyse from the point of view of network science. Here we analyse the evolution of the network of Bitcoin transactions between users. We achieve this by using the complete transaction history from December 5th 2011 to December 23rd 2013. This period includes three bubbles experienced by the Bitcoin price. In particular, we focus on the global and local structural properties of the user network and their variation in relation to the different period of price surge and decline. By analysing the temporal variation of the heterogeneity of the connectivity patterns we gain insights on the different mechanisms that take place during bubbles, and find that hubs (i.e., the most connected nodes) had a fundamental role in triggering the burst of the second bubble. Finally, we examine the local topological st...