Where is the information on USD/Bitcoin hourly prices?

• Main Authors: Helder Sebastião, António Portugal Duarte, Gabriel Guerreiro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Coimbra University Press 2018-02-01
• Series: Notas Económicas
• Online Access: https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/notaseconomicas/article/view/5292

This paper analyses the price discovery in the USD/Bitcoin market since Mar‑2014 to Nov‑2016. The results show a positive relationship between the informational relevance of exchanges and their market shares. Information is mostly transmitted between exchanges within an hour, at least for the main exchanges, although lagged feedbacks occur from the major exchanges. Minor exchanges are merely satellite ones and react to price information with some delay. Bitfinex is the most important exchange: the lagged feedback from this exchange to the market is 18.3%, while the reverse feedback accounts only for 0.6% of the total feedback. Volatility in the major exchanges is the main factor explaining the feedback measures, which sustains the claim that the relative importance of the information-based component of volatility increases with the relative dimension of the exchange.