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The paper aims to examine the asymmetric response of three major altcoins to shocks in six African fiat currencies in a time-frequency space.

Data are for the period 10th August 2015 to 2nd February 2019 at a daily frequency. The authors capture the time and frequency information in the return series of the currencies using the ensemble empirical mode decomposition. The authors implemented quantile regression and quantile-in-quantile regression on the decomposed series to test the response of altcoins to both positive and negative shocks in the fiat currencies across time to see if the altcoins are viable alternatives to African fiat currencies.

The outcome of the study suggests that altcoins behave differently from African fiat currencies and are viable alternative digital currencies and good hedges for African fiat currencies from the medium-term.

Policymakers in Africa and across the globe can follow this paper to mitigate currency crises by adopting altcoins as alternatives to fiat currencies. Forex traders can also mitigate trade risk by using altcoins to hedge dollar/African fiat currency exchange rate risk.

The research was conducted by the authors and has not been published in any journal.

The purpose of this research is to primarily understand how crypto traders can use the Bitcoin as a hedge or safe haven asset to reduce their losses from crypto trading. The study also aims to provide insights to crypto investors (portfolio managers) who wish to maintain a crypto portfolio for the medium term and can use the Bitcoin to minimize their losses. The findings of this research can also be used by policymakers and regulators for accommodating the Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, considering its safe haven nature.

This study applies the cross-quantilogram (CQ) approach introduced by Han et al. (2016) to examine the safe-haven property of the Bitcoin against the other selected crypto assets. This method is robust for estimating bivariate volatility spillover between two markets given unusual distributions and extreme observations. The CQ method is capable of calculating the magnitude of the shock from one market to another under different quantiles. Additionally, this method is suitable for fat-tailed distributions. Finally, the method allows anticipating long lags to evaluate the strength of the relationship between two variables in terms of durations and directions simultaneously.

The Bitcoin acts as a weak safe haven asset for a majority of new crypto assets for the entire study period. These results hold even during greed and fear sentiments in the crypto market. The Bitcoin has the ability to protect crypto assets from sharp downturns in the crypto market and hence gives crypto traders some respite when trading in a highly volatile asset class.

This study is the first attempt to show how the Bitcoin can act as a true matriarch/patriarch for crypto assets and protect them during market turmoil. This study presents a clear and concise representation of this relationship via heatmaps constructed from CQ analysis, depicting the quantile dependence association between the Bitcoin and other crypto assets. The uniqueness of this study also lies in the fact that it assesses the protective properties of the Bitcoin not only for the entire sample period but also specifically during periods of greed and fear in the crypto market.

Considering the different motivation for the creation of each of these cryptocurrencies, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is a dominant external factor in the cryptocurrency world. Using a novel two-step time and frequency independent methodology, the authors examine a large scope of cryptocurrencies and external factors within the same period, and analytical framework.

The examined cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Monero and Dash. In total, 18 external factors from 5 factor families are selected based on the mining motivation of these cryptocurrencies. The study first examines discrete wavelet transform-based (WTB) correlations, reduce the dimension and focuson relevant pairs. Selected pairs are further examined by wavelet coherence to capture the intermittent nature of the relationships allowing the most needed “Flexibility of frequency and time domains”.

Each coin appears to operate as a unique character with the exception of Bitcoin and Litecoin. There is no prominent external driver. The cryptocurrency market is not a clear substitute for a specific factor or market. Two-step WTB filtered wavelet coherence analysis help us to analyze a large number of factor without the loss of focus. The co-movements within the cryptocurrencies spillover from Ethereum to altcoins and later to Bitcoin.

The study presents one of the first examples of two-step WTB filtered wavelet coherence analysis. The methodology suggests an approach for simultaneous examination of large number of variables. The scope of the study provides a rather holistic view of the co-movements of external factors and major cryptocurrencies.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of volatility transmission among Bitcoin and other leading cryptocurrencies, namely, Binance USD, BNB, Cardano, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, Polygon, Solana, Tether, USD Coin and XRP.

The multivariate BEKK-GARCH model is used with the daily data set from 1 January 2017 to 31 March 2023. The data set is analysed in its entirety and is also the COVID-19 epidemic period.

The study reveals that while the volatility of cryptocurrency prices is influenced by their own historical shocks and volatility, there is proof of the effects shock transmission among Bitcoin and other notable cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, the authors identify the spillover effects of volatility among all 11 pairs and provide evidence that conditional correlations with varying time constants are present, and predominantly positive for both the entire and COVID-19 outbreak periods.

The findings will be helpful to market experts who want to avoid losses in traditional assets. To develop the best risk management and hedging strategies, businesses might use the information to build asset portfolios or personalise payment methods. The use of such data by investors and portfolio managers could aid in the development of investment opportunities, risk insurance plans or hedging strategies for the management of financial portfolios.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the use of the BEKK-GARCH model for examining the effects of volatility spillover among Bitcoin and the other eleven top cryptocurrencies has not been previously documented.

This paper aims to present a methodology for constructing cointegrated portfolios consisting of different cryptocurrencies and examines the performance of a number of trading strategies for the cryptocurrency portfolios.

The authors apply a series of statistical methods, including the Johansen test and Engle–Granger test, to derive a linear combination of cryptocurrencies that form a mean-reverting portfolio. Trading systems are designed and different trading strategies with stop-loss constraints are tested and compared according to a set of performance metrics.

The paper finds cointegrated portfolios involving four cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC), and the corresponding trading strategies are shown to be profitable under different configurations.

The main contributions of the study are the use of multiple altcoins in addition to bitcoin to construct a cointegrated portfolio, and the detailed comparison of the performance of different trading strategies with and without stop-loss constraints.

This article aims to uncover the impact of Google Trends on cryptocurrency markets beyond Bitcoin during the time of increased attention to altcoins, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper analyses the nexus among the Google Trends and six cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin, New Economy Movement (NEM), Dash, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin by utilizing the causality-in-quantiles technique on data comprised of the years January 2016–March 2021.

The findings show that Google Trends cause the Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum and NEM prices at majority of the quantiles except for Dash.

The findings will help investors to develop more in-depth understanding of impact of Google Trends on cryptocurrency prices and build successful trading strategies in a more matured digital assets ecosystem.

This study aims to examine the use of cryptocurrencies and transactions in medical tourism and to discuss how this use provides advantages to healthcare institutions and states that provide medical tourism services.

This study is a descriptive, cross-sectional, correlational and methodological quantitative research. Data were collected through a questionnaire with 555 potential medical tourists. Data were analyzed with Pearson correlation and hierarchical regression using STATA.

The correlation results showed a statistically significant high and positive correlation between the use of cryptocurrencies and transactions in medical tourism and the medical tourist's intention. The variables that contributed to the medical tourist's intention were monetary risk minimization, access-security and malpractice-civil trial in the highest order of contribution. Accordingly, the monetary risk minimization was the most contributing to the medical tourist's intention.

This study provides a piece of initial empirical evidence on the contribution of using cryptocurrencies and transactions in medical tourism.

This paper aims to demonstrate a dynamic cointegration-based pairs trading strategy, including an optimal look-back window framework in the cryptocurrency market and evaluate its return and risk by applying three different scenarios.

This study uses the Engle-Granger methodology, the Kapetanios-Snell-Shin test and the Johansen test as cointegration tests in different scenarios. This study calibrates the mean-reversion speed of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process to obtain the half-life used for the asset selection phase and look-back window estimation.

By considering the main limitations in the market microstructure, the strategy of this paper exceeds the naive buy-and-hold approach in the Bitmex exchange. Another significant finding is that this study implements a numerous collection of cryptocurrency coins to formulate the model’s spread, which improves the risk-adjusted profitability of the pairs trading strategy. Besides, the strategy’s maximum drawdown level is reasonably low, which makes it useful to be deployed. The results also indicate that a class of coins has better potential arbitrage opportunities than others.

This research has some noticeable advantages, making it stand out from similar studies in the cryptocurrency market. First is the accuracy of data in which minute-binned data create the signals in the formation period. Besides, to backtest the strategy during the trading period, this study simulates the trading signals using best bid/ask quotes and market trades. This study exclusively takes the order execution into account when the asset size is already available at its quoted price (with one or more period gaps after signal generation). This action makes the backtesting much more realistic.

The purpose of this study hopes to encourage further research into the topic of local currencies, as well as specific research into increasing the efficiency of these systems through the use of blockchain technology. There is currently a lack of available research into the topic, which poses barriers for those who wish to study it, so the paper provides a general overview to be used as a starting point for those wishing to broaden their knowledge of local currency systems while also introducing a working implementation of a proof-of-concept for the proposed system.

A literature review of available studies on local currencies is conducted to provide an overview of the current systems and their shortcomings. Subsequently, blockchain technology is briefly introduced and an Ethereum-based model is proposed, which helps overcome the problems identified. The section exploring the Ethereum-based model draws code written by the author to simulate the features.

The paper concludes that blockchain technology can significantly help improve efficiency, transparency and security of local currency systems, while also helping cut costs associated with the implementation of a complementary monetary system. In the medium-term, local currency systems will most likely use a blockchain protocol as the underlying technology for the network.

Local currencies are an understudied topic by itself and the intersection between them and blockchain is a nearly non-existent research space. Thus, the paper takes a multidisciplinary approach, aiming to bridge the fields of computer science and economics to provide a foundation for further research.

One important characteristic of cryptocurrencies has been their high and erratic volatility. To represent this complicated behavior, recent studies have emphasized the use of autoregressive models frequently concluding that generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models are the most adequate to overcome the limitations of conventional standard deviation estimates. Some studies have expanded this approach including jumps into the modeling. Following this line of research, and extending previous research, our study analyzes the volatility of Bitcoin employing and comparing some symmetric and asymmetric GARCH model extensions (threshold ARCH (TARCH), exponential GARCH (EGARCH), asymmetric power ARCH (APARCH), component GARCH (CGARCH), and asymmetric component GARCH (ACGARCH)), under two distributions (normal and generalized error). Additionally, because linear GARCH models can produce biased results if the series exhibit structural changes, once the conditional volatility has been modeled, we identify the best fitting GARCH model applying a Markov switching model to test whether Bitcoin volatility evolves according to two different regimes: high volatility and low volatility. The period of study includes daily series from July 16, 2010 (the earliest date available) to January 24, 2019. Findings reveal that EGARCH model under generalized error distribution provides the best fit to model Bitcoin conditional volatility. According to the Markov switching autoregressive (MS-AR) Bitcoin’s conditional volatility displays two regimes: high volatility and low volatility.