Network Dynamics of a Financial Ecosystem
Name
s41598-020-61346-y.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.69 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
903ce345e99c761ae63592cd35183075
Author(s)
Somin, Shahar
Altshuler, Yaniv
Gordon, Goren
Pentland, Alex ’Sandy’
Shmueli, Erez
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Scientific Reports
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020, The Author(s). Global financial crises have led to the understanding that classical econometric models are limited in comprehending financial markets in extreme conditions, partially since they disregarded complex interactions within the system. Consequently, in recent years research efforts have been directed towards modeling the structure and dynamics of the underlying networks of financial ecosystems. However, difficulties in acquiring fine-grained empirical financial data, due to regulatory limitations, intellectual property and privacy control, still hinder the application of network analysis to financial markets. In this paper we study the trading of cryptocurrency tokens on top of the Ethereum Blockchain, which is the largest publicly available financial data source that has a granularity of individual trades and users, and which provides a rare opportunity to analyze and model financial behavior in an evolving market from its inception. This quickly developing economy is comprised of tens of thousands of different financial assets with an aggregated valuation of more than 500 Billion USD and typical daily volume of 30 Billion USD, and manifests highly volatile dynamics when viewed using classic market measures. However, by applying network theory methods we demonstrate clear structural properties and converging dynamics, indicating that this ecosystem functions as a single coherent financial market. These results suggest that a better understanding of traditional markets could become possible through the analysis of fine-grained, abundant and publicly available data of cryptomarkets.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1038/S41598-020-61346-Y
