Wu Ke, Wheatley Spencer, Sornette Didier
Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH Zurich, Scheuchzerstrasse 7, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
Swiss Finance Institute, c/o University of Geneva, Switzerland.
R Soc Open Sci. 2018 Sep 5;5(9):180381. doi: 10.1098/rsos.180381. eCollection 2018 Sep.
We empirically verify that the market capitalizations of coins and tokens in the cryptocurrency universe follow power-law distributions with significantly different values for the tail exponent falling between 0.5 and 0.7 for coins, and between 1.0 and 1.3 for tokens. We provide a rationale for this, based on a simple proportional growth with birth and death model previously employed to describe the size distribution of firms, cities, webpages, etc. We empirically validate the model and its main predictions, in terms of proportional growth (Gibrat's Law) of the coins and tokens. Estimating the main parameters of the model, the theoretical predictions for the power-law exponents of coin and token distributions are in remarkable agreement with the empirical estimations, given the simplicity of the model. Our results clearly characterize coins as being 'entrenched incumbents' and tokens as an 'explosive immature ecosystem', largely due to massive and exuberant Initial Coin Offering activity in the token space. The theory predicts that the exponent for tokens should converge to 1 in the future, reflecting a more reasonable rate of new entrants associated with genuine technological innovations.
我们通过实证验证了加密货币领域中硬币和代币的市值遵循幂律分布，其中硬币的尾部指数在0.5至0.7之间，代币的尾部指数在1.0至1.3之间，二者数值显著不同。我们基于先前用于描述公司、城市、网页等规模分布的简单出生和死亡比例增长模型对此给出了一个合理的解释。我们根据硬币和代币的比例增长（吉布拉特法则）对该模型及其主要预测进行了实证验证。在估计模型的主要参数时，鉴于模型的简单性，硬币和代币分布的幂律指数的理论预测与实证估计结果惊人地一致。我们的结果清楚地将硬币表征为“稳固的现有者”，将代币表征为“爆炸性的不成熟生态系统”，这主要归因于代币领域大量且活跃的首次代币发行活动。该理论预测，代币的指数未来应会收敛至1，这反映出与真正技术创新相关的新进入者的更合理比率。
