Integration of Cryptocurrency into the Global Financial Market: Conclusion and References

Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

Data and Methodology

Results and Discussion

Conclusion and References

4. Conclusions

Based on the multiscale cross-correlation analysis performed for the data covering almost the last three years, it can be concluded that the cryptocurrency market dynamics is substantially tied to the traditional financial markets. Consistently, the most liquid cryptocurrencies, BTC and ETH, cannot serve as a hedge or safe haven for the stock market investments, not only during the turbulent periods like the Covid-19 panic, where this effect is particularly strong, but also during the recent bear market period on tech stocks, which has been accompanied by the parallel bear market on cryptocurrencies. Many observations show that the Covid-19 pandemic may have changed the paradigm that the cryptocurrency market is a largely autonomous market. The recent market developments and the strong US dollar have additionally increased the strength of the cross-correlations between BTC and ETH on the one side and the US tech stocks on the other side. These observations support some earlier findings on the same subject (e.g., [22,70]). In contrast, as the cryptocurrency market was weakly correlated with other markets during 2021, our results cannot support directly a recent hypothesis that the quantitative easing could actually be responsible for these correlations [22]. The existence of links between the global economy and the cryptocurrency market are further strengthened by the reaction of the price changes of BTC and ETH to economic data, such as CPI inflation, in a similar way to traditional financial instruments. These results are able to remove or, at least, to suppress the uncertainty that recent literature on this topic has brought to the cryptocurrency investors. Now it is more clear that the cryptocurrencies can no longer serve as a convenient hedging target for the investors whose purpose is to diversify the risk.

Our study brings a strong indication that the cryptocurrency market has finally become a connected part of the global financial markets after 12 years of the maturation process. Whether such a direction of this market evolution remains in agreement with the early vision of the cryptocurrency creators can be disputed, however. We also face a related question: does the fact that we have got “just another part of the global financial market” deserve devoting so huge amounts of energy to it? Sooner or later this question must be addressed by the policy makers. Nevertheless, what becomes evident now is that it allows the market participants to broaden the spectrum of their investment possibilities.

Among the limitations that might have influenced our study and, subsequently, our conclusions, we have to mention that only two principal cryptocurrencies were studied. Although they are the most influential, the most frequently traded, and widely discussed cryptocurrencies, they by no means define the entire market. It is possible that an analysis that included some less important cryptocurrencies would bring different outcomes. This is especially likely for the marginal cryptocurrencies without any thinkable “fundamental” value, whose dynamics is driven predominantly by extreme speculation. However, as the cryptocurrency market is looked at by the most investors through the lens of BTC and ETH (as their capitalization indicates), this particular limitation does not seem discouraging to us. Currently, these two assets shape the whole cryptocurrency market and we expect them to continue doing it in the nearest future. Another limitation of our analysis is the particular selection of the traditional financial instruments. Indeed, they constitute only a small fraction of the available ones. We are convinced, though, that they are among the most observed and the most influential ones in the context of the global economy, which fully justifies our choice.

A more general observation that the cryptocurrency market has spontaneously coupled to the technological sector of the stock markets by reacting to some trigger provided by the external data inflow resembles analogous effects of the spontaneous emergence of order among the so-far independent degrees of freedom in the various complex systems. However, as complexity allows for flexible reacting of a system to both the external perturbations and internal processes, such effects of ordering in the financial markets have to be eventually counterbalanced by the opposite processes of disordering. Therefore, the market participants must be aware that the inter-market couplings may not last forever and they can significantly be weakened or even removed completely at some point in future. This is why the in-depth studies of the cross-market dependencies have to remain among the principal directions of the cryptocurrency research. Our future work will also deal with energy consumption of the cryptocurrency market.

Author Contributions: Conceptualisation, S.D., J.K. and M.W.; methodology, S.D., J.K. and M.W.; software, M.W.; validation, S.D., J.K. and M.W.; formal analysis, M.W.; investigation, S.D., J.K. and M.W.; resources, M.W.; data curation, M.W.; writing—original draft preparation, M.W.; writing review and editing, S.D., J.K. and M.W.; visualisation, M.W.; supervision, S.D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Data Availability Statement: Data available freely from Dukascopy [58].

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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