Collapsing bubbles in the prices of cryptocurrencies

This paper investigates the existence of bubbles in the daily prices of the most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Ripple (XRP), employing the recursive methods of Phillips et al. (2015) and Phillips et al. (2011) for testing and date-stamping episodes of exuberant behaviour over a period spanning seven years (2018–2024), including the COVID-19 pandemic crisis (2020–2021). The critical values of the tests are computed through the composite wild bootstrap technique by Phillips and Shi (2020) to make them robust to time-varying unconditional heteroscedasticity and the multiplicity issue in recursive tests. Results indicate that the prices of the most popular cryptocurrencies traded on decentralized ledgers, BTC and ETH, exhibited multiple episodes of exuberant behaviour, unambiguously for BTC and depending on the tests for ETH. Bubbles detected in the prices of BTC were due to the halving of the crypto, to market exuberance and to the pandemic crisis; bubbles detected on ETH prices were due to the launch of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, and to the change in investors’ expectations (from exuberant to pessimistic); the change in the stance of monetary policy burst the bubbles of BTC and ETH prices in 2024. No test supports the exuberance of XRP that is traded on a centralized ledger; weekly data confirm the absence of multiple bubbles. By looking at the presence of bubbles in these different digital ecosystems, we also consider how the technological differences can impact, possibly asymmetrically, bubbles’ formation.