We offer an equilibrium model of cryptocurrency pricing and confront it to new data on bitcoin transactional benefits and costs. The model emphasises that the fundamental value of the cryptocurrency is the stream of net transactional benefits it will provide, which depend on its future prices....

Liquidity suppliers lean against the wind. We analyze whether high-frequency traders (HFTs) lean against large institutional orders that execute through a series of child orders. The alternative is HFTs trading "with the wind," that is, in the same direction. We find that HFTs initially lean...