Crypto gives researchers something traditional markets never could: fully transparent, public market data — every trade, every liquidity position, every liquidation, on-chain and downloadable. The result is a research field where microstructure questions that took decades to answer for equities get answered in months, alongside genuinely new objects of study: automated market makers, MEV, stablecoin mechanisms, and perpetual futures funding.
Quality varies more here than in any other hub. The strongest work treats crypto as a natural laboratory — testing arbitrage, momentum, and market-making theory against complete data. The weakest imports an equity-market technique, runs it on three years of BTC prices, and declares alpha. Check the sample period against regime shifts (pre/post 2021 institutional entry, exchange collapses) before trusting any backtest, and note that many exploitable inefficiencies documented in 2018-era papers have long since been arbitraged away.
Related hubs: Market Microstructure, Statistical Arbitrage, NLP & LLMs in Finance.
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) hold assets and are constantly being rebalanced by external arbitrageurs to match external market prices. Loss-versus-rebalancing (LVR) is a pivotal metric for measuring how an AMM pool performs for its liquidity providers (LPs) relative to an idealised benchmark where
This paper investigates the cryptocurrency network of the FTX exchange during the collapse of its native token, FTT, to understand how network structures adapt to significant financial disruptions, by exploiting vertex centrality measures. Using proprietary data on the transactional relationships be
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in Constant Function Market Making is fairly well understood. Does having dynamic weights, as found in liquidity boostrap pools (LBPs), Temporal-function market makers (TFMMs), and Replicating market makers (RMMs), introduce new attack vectors? In this paper we explor
Building on a previous foundation work (Lussange et al. 2020), this study introduces a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) model simulating crypto markets, which is calibrated to the Binance’s daily closing prices of $153$ cryptocurrencies that were continuously traded between 2018 and 2022. U
We study the temporal evolution of the holding-time distribution of bitcoins and find that the average distribution of holding-time is a heavy-tailed power law extending from one day to over at least $200$ weeks with an exponent approximately equal to $0.9$, indicating very long memory effects. We a
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
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
We study the stochastic structure of cryptocurrency rates of returns as compared to stock returns by focusing on the associated cross-sectional distributions. We build two datasets. The first comprises forty-six major cryptocurrencies, and the second includes all the companies listed in the S&P 500.
High-frequency trading (HFT) uses computer algorithms to make trading decisions in short time scales (e.g., second-level), which is widely used in the Cryptocurrency (Crypto) market (e.g., Bitcoin). Reinforcement learning (RL) in financial research has shown stellar performance on many quantitative
Constant product markets with concentrated liquidity (CL) are the most popular type of automated market makers. In this paper, we characterise the continuous-time wealth dynamics of strategic LPs who dynamically adjust their range of liquidity provision in CL pools. Their wealth results from fee inc
We investigate how liquidity providers (LPs) choose between high- and low-fee trading venues, in the face of a fixed common gas cost. Analyzing Uniswap data, we find that high-fee pools attract 58% of liquidity supply yet execute only 21% of volume. Large LPs dominate low-fee pools, frequently adjus
This research introduces a novel pairs trading strategy based on copulas for cointegrated pairs of cryptocurrencies. To identify the most suitable pairs, the study employs linear and non-linear cointegration tests along with a correlation coefficient measure and fits different copula families to gen
We demonstrate market inefficiency in cryptoasset markets. Our approach examines investments that share a dominant risk factor but differ in their exposure to a secondary risk. We derive equilibrium restrictions that must hold regardless of how investors price either risk. Our empirical results stro
This study investigates whether cryptocurrency whitepaper narratives align with empirically observed market factor structure. We construct a pipeline combining zero-shot NLP classification of 38 whitepapers across 10 semantic categories with CP tensor decomposition of hourly market data (49 assets,
This document analyzes price discovery in cryptocurrency markets by comparing centralized and decentralized exchanges, as well as spot and futures markets. The study focuses first on Ethereum (ETH) and then applies a similar approach to Bitcoin (BTC). Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical framework, em
Using data from a live trading experiment on the Binance Bitcoin perpetual, we examine the effects of (i) basic order book mechanics and (ii) the persistence of price changes from immediate to short timescales, revealing the interplay between returns, queue sizes, and orders’ queue positions. We doc
Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin (BTC) has garnered increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, due to the massive transaction volume, no systematic study has quantitatively measured the asset decentralization degree specifically from a network perspective. In this paper, by cond
Predicting volatility in financial markets, including stocks, index ETFs, foreign exchange, and cryptocurrencies, remains a challenging task due to the inherent complexity and non-linear dynamics of these time series. In this study, I apply TimeMixer, a state-of-the-art time series forecasting model
We develop a framework for composite likelihood estimation of parametric continuous-time stationary Gaussian processes. We derive the asymptotic theory of the associated maximum composite likelihood estimator. We implement our approach on a pair of models that have been proposed to describe the rand
Decentralized finance (DeFi) can broaden access while leaving activity, network position, and infrastructure concentrated. We develop a four-dimensional framework for participation, activity distribution, structural position, and infrastructure dependence, integrating network theory, theorem-consist