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Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market
The cryptocurrency market surpassed the barrier of $100 billion market capitalization in June 2017, after months of steady growth. Despite its increasing relevance in the financial world, a comprehensive analysis of the whole system is still lacking, as most studies have focused exclusively on the b...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society Publishing
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5717631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29291057 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170623 |
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author | ElBahrawy, Abeer Alessandretti, Laura Kandler, Anne Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo Baronchelli, Andrea |
author_facet | ElBahrawy, Abeer Alessandretti, Laura Kandler, Anne Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo Baronchelli, Andrea |
author_sort | ElBahrawy, Abeer |
collection | PubMed |
description | The cryptocurrency market surpassed the barrier of $100 billion market capitalization in June 2017, after months of steady growth. Despite its increasing relevance in the financial world, a comprehensive analysis of the whole system is still lacking, as most studies have focused exclusively on the behaviour of one (Bitcoin) or few cryptocurrencies. Here, we consider the history of the entire market and analyse the behaviour of 1469 cryptocurrencies introduced between April 2013 and May 2017. We reveal that, while new cryptocurrencies appear and disappear continuously and their market capitalization is increasing (super-)exponentially, several statistical properties of the market have been stable for years. These include the number of active cryptocurrencies, market share distribution and the turnover of cryptocurrencies. Adopting an ecological perspective, we show that the so-called neutral model of evolution is able to reproduce a number of key empirical observations, despite its simplicity and the assumption of no selective advantage of one cryptocurrency over another. Our results shed light on the properties of the cryptocurrency market and establish a first formal link between ecological modelling and the study of this growing system. We anticipate they will spark further research in this direction. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5717631 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | The Royal Society Publishing |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-57176312017-12-29 Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market ElBahrawy, Abeer Alessandretti, Laura Kandler, Anne Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo Baronchelli, Andrea R Soc Open Sci Computer Science The cryptocurrency market surpassed the barrier of $100 billion market capitalization in June 2017, after months of steady growth. Despite its increasing relevance in the financial world, a comprehensive analysis of the whole system is still lacking, as most studies have focused exclusively on the behaviour of one (Bitcoin) or few cryptocurrencies. Here, we consider the history of the entire market and analyse the behaviour of 1469 cryptocurrencies introduced between April 2013 and May 2017. We reveal that, while new cryptocurrencies appear and disappear continuously and their market capitalization is increasing (super-)exponentially, several statistical properties of the market have been stable for years. These include the number of active cryptocurrencies, market share distribution and the turnover of cryptocurrencies. Adopting an ecological perspective, we show that the so-called neutral model of evolution is able to reproduce a number of key empirical observations, despite its simplicity and the assumption of no selective advantage of one cryptocurrency over another. Our results shed light on the properties of the cryptocurrency market and establish a first formal link between ecological modelling and the study of this growing system. We anticipate they will spark further research in this direction. The Royal Society Publishing 2017-11-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5717631/ /pubmed/29291057 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170623 Text en © 2017 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Computer Science ElBahrawy, Abeer Alessandretti, Laura Kandler, Anne Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo Baronchelli, Andrea Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market |
title | Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market |
title_full | Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market |
title_fullStr | Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market |
title_full_unstemmed | Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market |
title_short | Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market |
title_sort | evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market |
topic | Computer Science |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5717631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29291057 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170623 |
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