Explosion in Virtual Assets (Cryptocurrencies)

Abstract

The goal of this research is to analyze the presence of financial bubbles or an explosive behavior in four cryptocurrencies: Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, and EOS. The assets' selection was based on market capitalization. The methodology implemented was a simple and generalized test (SADF and GSADF) of a variation of the augmented Dickey-Fuller test proposed by Phillips et al. (2011, 2015). We found ten, seven, six and seven exuberant behaviors in the aforesaid assets, respectively. This methodology has been largely unexplored and could be employed on a standard basis in the financial sector for any other asset. This is the first research that detects this type of behavior for a group of cryptocurrencies with daily frequency. With the present research and the paper of Li et al. (2018), 68.47% of the market has been analyzed under the methodology. Consequently, this behavior could be dispersed throughout the sector.