IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/sfb649/sfb649dp2016-038.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The cross-section of crypto-currencies as financial assets: An overview

Author

Listed:
  • Elendner, Hermann
  • Trimborn, Simon
  • Ong, Bobby
  • Lee, Teik Ming

Abstract

Crypto-currencies have developed a vibrant market since bitcoin, the rst crypto-currency, was created in 2009. We look at the properties of cryptocurrencies as financial assets in a broad cross-section. We discuss approaches of altcoins to generate value and their trading and information platforms. Then we investigate crypto-currencies as alternative investment assets, studying their returns and the co-movements of altcoin prices with bitcoin and against each other. We evaluate their addition to investors' portfolios and document they are indeed able to enhance the diversification of portfolios due to their little co-movements with established assets, as well as with each other. Furthermore, we evaluate pure portfolios of crypto-currencies: an equallyweighted one, a value-weighted one, and one based on the CRypto-currency IndeX (CRIX). The CRIX portfolio displays lower risk than any individual of the liquid crypto-currencies. We also document the changing characteristics of the crypto-currency market. Deepening liquidity is accompanied by a rise in market value, and a growing number of altcoins is contributing larger amounts to aggregate crypto-currency market capitalization.

Suggested Citation

  • Elendner, Hermann & Trimborn, Simon & Ong, Bobby & Lee, Teik Ming, 2016. "The cross-section of crypto-currencies as financial assets: An overview," SFB 649 Discussion Papers 2016-038, Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:sfb649:sfb649dp2016-038
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/148874/1/870165852.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    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:zbw:sfb649:sfb649dp2016-038. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sohubde.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.