IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mse/cesdoc/19020.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Crypto assets: the role of ICO tokens within a well-diversified portfolio

Author

Abstract

This paper re-examines the discussion on blockchain technology, crypto assets and ICOs providing also evidence that in crypto markets there are currently two classes of assets, namely standalone cryptocurrencies (or 'coins') and tokens which result from an ICO and are intrisically linked to the performance of the issuing company or venture. While the former have been arguments of various empirical studies regarding their price dynamics and their effect on the variance of a well-diversified portfolio, no such study has been done to analyze listed tokens, which in our sample are over 700 and with a backing of about §17.3Bn from their respective ICOs. Therefore, investors interested in optimizing their portfolios should first assess the diversifier, hedge or safe haven role of tokens vis-à-vis traditional assets, on top of 'coins' in order to sensibly use this new asset class. After constructing various indices to represent both the token asset class as a whole and its sub-classes, we model dynamic conditional correlations among all the assets in our sample to obtain time-varying correlations for each token-asset pair. We find that tokens are effective diversifiers but not a hedge or a safe haven asset. We evidence that tokens retain important systematic differences with the two other asset classes to which they are most generally compared to, namely 'coins' and equities

Suggested Citation

  • Saman Adhami & Dominique Guégan, 2019. "Crypto assets: the role of ICO tokens within a well-diversified portfolio," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 19020, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    • Handle: RePEc:mse:cesdoc:19020
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2019/19020.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dirk G. Baur & Brian M. Lucey, 2010. "Is Gold a Hedge or a Safe Haven? An Analysis of Stocks, Bonds and Gold," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 45(2), pages 217-229, May.
    2. Adhami, Saman & Giudici, Giancarlo & Martinazzi, Stefano, 2018. "Why do businesses go crypto? An empirical analysis of initial coin offerings," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 64-75.
    3. Baur, Dirk G. & McDermott, Thomas K., 2010. "Is gold a safe haven? International evidence," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(8), pages 1886-1898, August.
    4. Lorenzo Cappiello & Robert F. Engle & Kevin Sheppard, 2006. "Asymmetric Dynamics in the Correlations of Global Equity and Bond Returns," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 4(4), pages 537-572.
    5. Sabrina T. Howell & Marina Niessner & David Yermack, 2018. "Initial Coin Offerings: Financing Growth with Cryptocurrency Token Sales," NBER Working Papers 24774, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Fisch, Christian, 2019. "Initial coin offerings (ICOs) to finance new ventures," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 1-22.
    7. Trimborn, Simon & Härdle, Wolfgang Karl, 2018. "CRIX an Index for cryptocurrencies," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 107-122.
    8. Giancarlo Giudici & Saman Adhami, 2019. "The impact of governance signals on ICO fundraising success," Economia e Politica Industriale: Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, Springer;Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale, vol. 46(2), pages 283-312, June.
    9. Engle, Robert, 2002. "Dynamic Conditional Correlation: A Simple Class of Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(3), pages 339-350, July.
    10. Urquhart, Andrew & Zhang, Hanxiong, 2019. "Is Bitcoin a hedge or safe haven for currencies? An intraday analysis," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 49-57.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. José Campino & Ana Brochado & Álvaro Rosa, 2021. "Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs): the importance of human capital," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 91(8), pages 1225-1262, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Saman Adhami & Dominique Guegan, 2019. "Crypto assets: the role of ICO tokens within a well-diversified portfolio," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-02353656, HAL.
    2. Saman Adhami & Dominique Guegan, 2019. "Crypto assets: the role of ICO tokens within a well-diversified portfolio," Post-Print halshs-02353656, HAL.
    3. Saman Adhami & Dominique Guegan, 2020. "Crypto assets: the role of ICO tokens within a well-diversified portfolio," Economia e Politica Industriale: Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, Springer;Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale, vol. 47(2), pages 219-241, June.
    4. Jiang, Yonghong & Lie, Jiayi & Wang, Jieru & Mu, Jinqi, 2021. "Revisiting the roles of cryptocurrencies in stock markets: A quantile coherency perspective," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 21-34.
    5. Esparcia, Carlos & Jareño, Francisco & Umar, Zaghum, 2022. "Revisiting the safe haven role of Gold across time and frequencies during the COVID-19 pandemic," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    6. Lennart Ante, 2020. "A place next to Satoshi: foundations of blockchain and cryptocurrency research in business and economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1305-1333, August.
    7. Maurice Omane-Adjepong & Imhotep Paul Alagidede, 2020. "Dynamic Linkages and Economic Role of Leading Cryptocurrencies in an Emerging Market," Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Springer;Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering, vol. 27(4), pages 537-585, December.
    8. Nikolaos A. Kyriazis, 2021. "A Survey on Volatility Fluctuations in the Decentralized Cryptocurrency Financial Assets," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-46, June.
    9. Riadh Abed & Amna Zardoub, 2019. "On the co-movements among gold and other financial markets: a multivariate time-varying asymmetric approach," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 16(4), pages 701-719, October.
    10. Raza, Naveed & Ali, Sajid & Shahzad, Syed Jawad Hussain & Raza, Syed Ali, 2018. "Do commodities effectively hedge real estate risk? A multi-scale asymmetric DCC approach," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 10-29.
    11. Ángeles Cebrián-Hernández & Enrique Jiménez-Rodríguez, 2021. "Modeling of the Bitcoin Volatility through Key Financial Environment Variables: An Application of Conditional Correlation MGARCH Models," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(3), pages 1-16, January.
    12. Ali, Sajid & Raza, Naveed & Vinh Vo, Xuan & Le, Van, 2022. "Modelling the joint dynamics of financial assets using MGARCH family models: Insights into hedging and diversification strategies," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    13. Kamal, Javed Bin & Hassan, M. Kabir, 2022. "Asymmetric connectedness between cryptocurrency environment attention index and green assets," The Journal of Economic Asymmetries, Elsevier, vol. 25(C).
    14. Singh, Amanjot, 2021. "Investigating the dynamic relationship between litigation funding, gold, bitcoin and the stock market: The case of Australia," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 45-57.
    15. Didik Susilo & Sugeng Wahyudi & Irene Rini Demi Pangestuti & Bayu Adi Nugroho & Robiyanto Robiyanto, 2020. "Cryptocurrencies: Hedging Opportunities From Domestic Perspectives in Southeast Asia Emerging Markets," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(4), pages 21582440209, November.
    16. Dmitri Boreiko & Dimche Risteski, 2021. "Serial and large investors in initial coin offerings," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 57(2), pages 1053-1071, August.
    17. Akhtaruzzaman, Md & Boubaker, Sabri & Lucey, Brian M. & Sensoy, Ahmet, 2021. "Is gold a hedge or a safe-haven asset in the COVID–19 crisis?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    18. Morema, Kgotso & Bonga-Bonga, Lumengo, 2018. "The impact of oil and gold price fluctuations on the South African equity market: volatility spillovers and implications for portfolio management," MPRA Paper 87637, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Dao, Thong M. & McGroarty, Frank & Urquhart, Andrew, 2019. "The Brexit vote and currency markets," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 153-164.
    20. Yousaf, Imran & Plakandaras, Vasilios & Bouri, Elie & Gupta, Rangan, 2023. "Hedge and safe-haven properties of FAANA against gold, US Treasury, bitcoin, and US Dollar/CHF during the pandemic period," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cryptocurrency; DCC-MGARCH; Hedge; Initial Coin Offering; Safe Haven;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mse:cesdoc:19020. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucie Label (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cenp1fr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.