Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be used to represent ownership of digital art or any other unique digital item where ownership is recorded in smart contracts on a blockchain. NFTs have recently received enormous attention from both cryptocurrency investors and the media. We examine why NFTs have gotten so much attention. Using vector autoregressive models, we show that Bitcoin returns significantly predict next week’s NFT growth in popularity, measured by Google search queries. Moreover, wavelet coherence analysis suggests that Bitcoin and Ether returns are significant drivers of next week’s attention to NFTs. These results indicate that the remarkable increases in prices of major cryptocurrencies can explain the hype around NFTs.
This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on Bitcoin trading volume. Using data from Apple mobility trends and several time-series econometric models, we find that investors became active participants during the COVID-19 pandemic period and traded more bitcoins on days with low mobility associated with lockdown mandates. These results remain robust after controlling for stocks and gold returns, the VIX index, and the level of attention and sentiment toward Bitcoin, as measured by Google search frequencies and the tone of Tweets discussing Bitcoin. These results suggest that when individual investors have ample free time on their hands, they trade cryptocurrencies as a pastime and use the Bitcoin market as a form of entertainment. Moreover, our results have important implications concerning investors’ herding behavior and overconfidence leading to noise trader risks and bubbles typically accompanied by high trading volume in cryptocurrency markets.
We analyze the effects of attention to global warming on the success of environmental initial coin offerings (ICOs) measured by the total funding amount raised in the actual ICOs and the long-term survival of the projects. Using a database featuring 324 environmental initial coin offerings between 2017 and 2019, we find that attention to global warming increases the total funding raised in an environmental ICO. Moreover, we find that environmental offerings that occur during periods of greater attention to global warming are significantly less likely to fail in the long term. Our results are consistent with the idea that investor attention as a market-discipline mechanism increases the likelihood of survival for environmental ICOs.
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