Bitcoin volatility in bull vs. bear market-insights from analyzing on-chain metrics and Twitter posts

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a popular investment vehicle, prompting numerous efforts to predict market trends and identify metrics that signal periods of volatility. One promising approach involves leveraging on-chain data, which is unique to cryptocurrencies. On-chain data, extracted directly from the blockchain, provides valuable information, such as the hash rate, total transactions, or the total number of addresses that hold a specified amount of cryptocurrency. Some studies have also explored the relationship between social media sentiment and Bitcoin, using data from platforms such as Twitter and Google Trends. However, the quality of Twitter sentiment analysis has been lackluster due to suboptimal extraction techniques. This research proposes a novel approach that combines a superior sentiment analysis technique with various on-chain metrics to improve predictions using a deep learning architecture based on long-short term memory (LSTM). The proposed model predicts outcomes for multiple time horizons, ranging from one day to 14 days, and outperforms the Martingale (random walk) approach by over 9%, as measured by the mean absolute percentage error metric, as well as recent results reported in literature. To the best of our knowledge, this study may be among the first to employ this combination of techniques to improve cryptocurrency market prediction.