Cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin (BTC), which comprise a new revolutionary asset class, have drawn extraordinary worldwide attention. The characteristics of the cryptocurrency/ BTC include a high level of speculation, extreme volatility and price discontinuity. In this paper, we propose a...

The 2017 bubble on the cryptocurrency market recalls our memory in the dot-com bubble, during which hard-to-measure fundamentals and investors' illusion for brand new technologies led to overvalued prices. Benefiting from the massive increase in the volume of messages published on social media...

Cryptocurrencies come with benefits, such as anonymity of payments and positive network effects of user adoption, and transaction risks, such as unconfirmed transfers, hacks, and frauds. They compete with central-bank-regulated currencies as a means of payment but this competition is not...

This paper provides an empirical overview of the largely unexplored public blockchain ecosystem. Our overview highlights that only a few blockchains dominate the ecosystem although no single blockchain, not even Bitcoin, dominates uniformly. We explain our empirical findings with a simple...

The security of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains rests on the assumption that a large number of contributors have incentives to maintain copies of the underlying distributed ledger. However, excessive block rewards may inflate the value of each unique PoS coin. In this paper, we evaluate the...