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Arbitrage and Trading in Cryptocurrency Markets

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Arbitrage and Trading in Cryptocurrency Markets Department of Economics and Finance Course of Empirical Finance Arbitrage and Trading in Cryptocurrency Markets Prof. Paolo Santucci De Magistris Prof. Stefano Grassi SUPERVISOR CO-SUPERVISOR 712221 CANDIDATE Academic Year 2018/2019 Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 3 Chapter 1. General overview of cryptocurrencies and underlying technology ...................... 5 1.1 Technological aspects of blockchain and bitcoin ........................................................... 5 1.1.1 Blockchain, mining and hash function.................................................................... 6 1.1.2 Types of cryptocurrencies .................................................................................... 10 1.1.3 Wallets ................................................................................................................ 12 1.1.4 Transactions authentication .................................................................................. 13 1.1.5 Equilibria with positive values for Bitcoin ........................................................... 14 1.2 Bitcoin price ............................................................................................................... 17 1.3 Prospects of Bitcoin as a currency ............................................................................... 19 1.3.1 Medium of exchange............................................................................................ 22 1.3.2 Medium of account .............................................................................................. 26 1.3.3 Store of value ....................................................................................................... 28 1.3.4 Obstacles faced by bitcoin ................................................................................... 31 Chapter 2. Arbitrage in cryptocurrency markets .................................................................. 33 2.1 Literature review ......................................................................................................... 33 2.2 Liquidity estimation .................................................................................................... 36 2.2.1 Liquidity .............................................................................................................. 37 2.2.2 Exchanges ........................................................................................................... 42 2.2.3 Methodology ....................................................................................................... 43 2.2.4 Issues with the data .............................................................................................. 47 2.2.5 Results ................................................................................................................. 49 2.3 Arbitrage opportunities ............................................................................................... 53 2.3.1 Prices and returns ................................................................................................. 54 2.3.2 Arbitrage index .................................................................................................... 55 2.3.3 Arbitrage index within geographical regions ........................................................ 57 2.3.4 Arbitrage in other cryptocurrency markets ........................................................... 61 1 2.3.5 Arbitrage between cryptocurrency-to-cryptocurrency pairs .................................. 62 2.4 Order flow .................................................................................................................. 63 2.4.1 Data ..................................................................................................................... 65 2.4.2 Common components and order flow ................................................................... 67 2.4.3 Idiosyncratic price pressure .................................................................................. 69 2.4.4 Arbitrage trading strategies .................................................................................. 71 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 76 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 78 Appendix ................................................................................................................................. 81 2 Introduction Cryptocurrencies have experienced a noticeable rise and received a lot of attention over the past few years. These digital currencies are based on blockchain that is able to provide payments verification without a centralized custodian. Bitcoin came into existence in 2009, launched by anonymous person or group of persons, called Nakamoto. Over the past 10 years since that time, the cryptocurrency market has changed a lot. A lot of new coins have appeared, some of them are quite different from Bitcoin from a technological point of view. The total number of cryptocurrencies at the moment is more than two thousand, according to the Coinmarketcap website. All these altcoins are traded on more than 200 digital exchanges across the world. The average daily trading volume of Bitcoin is more than $20 billion as of May 2019, and for the entire cryptocurrency market, this figure is $ 65 billion. However, according to some sources, these figures might be significantly exaggerated (SEC, 2019); this topic will be analyzed further in the paper. It is estimated that the amount of active traders exceeds 15 million, including both retail and institutional investors (such as DRW, Jump Trading, or Hehmeyer Trading). While the cryptocurrency market is still young, it provides many opportunities for economic research. This paper touches the topics of cross-exchange arbitrage, the efficient market hypothesis, order book liquidity and wash-trading. First, in different geographical areas and jurisdictions, there are many non-integrated digital exchanges that operate in parallel. Most of them are almost unregulated and owned and managed privately. Most of these exchanges operate as ordinary stock markets, where traders place orders, and the exchange clears transactions based on a centralized order book. However, cryptocurrency exchanges also have many differences from stock markets. For example, there is no guarantee of the best price, as provided on traditional markets by the Securities Exchange Commission's NBBO rule. The National Best Bid and Offer rule helps retail investors who may not have the capacity to compare prices on several exchanges, providing them with the best price for the submitted order. The absence of such mechanisms implies that the comparison of prices on different markets and the subsequent selection of one of them for placing an order lies on the shoulders of market participants. Secondly, the stock exchanges are scattered around the world, and today the largest and the most liquid ones are located in Europe, Asia (Hong Kong, Japan, Korea) and the United States. But between many countries there are barriers to the free movement of capital, and the exchanges themselves in some cases do not allow foreign citizens to open an account. Such market segmentation creates opportunities for large players who have both a large amount of funds and opportunities for the movement of capital between countries. 3 This paper is structured as follows. The first chapter provides a number of stylized facts about cryptocurrencies, their classification and the underlying technology. After that the prospects of Bitcoin as a replacement for fiat money is discussed. First, we demonstrate that there are substantial opportunities for arbitrage trading in bitcoin across exchanges, that open up repeatedly and often exist for long periods of time, hours, days and sometimes even months. The second chapter discusses the practical aspects of cryptocurrency trading. The results demonstrate that most of the trading volumes are fictitious, and also reveals some ways of manipulating the trading volumes used by dishonest exchanges. After assessing the real liquidity and market depth of cryptocurrency exchanges, which do not inflate their volumes, an analysis of the arbitrage opportunities was performed. The obtained results show that the price dispersion across exchanges is present even on the largest and the most liquid exchanges. We build an arbitrage index to demonstrate that during some periods of time, the price difference between particular exchanges has been more than 50%, which is absolutely a violation to the law of one price. After that there is a discussion of why arbitrage opportunities exist and do not close for a long time (sometimes up to 2 months), and possible strategies for arbitrage traders. 4 Chapter 1. General overview of cryptocurrencies and underlying technology 1.1 Technological aspects of blockchain and bitcoin In 2008, the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto” posted a white paper describing an implementation of a digital currency called bitcoin that used blockchain technology. More than ten years later, hundreds of cryptocurrencies and innumerable other applications of blockchain technology are readily available. The rise of cryptocurrencies poses an existential threat to many traditional functions in finance.
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