The Analysis of Effective Factors on Virtual Currency Prices (A Case Study of Bitcoin and Ethereum)

Significant fluctuations in the price of cryptocurrencies has led to the identification of effective factors on their prices, and it is important to understand this in the financial markets. In the present paper, the time series analysis method is used to study the determinants of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices. For this purpose, the stock price index on the New York Stock Exchange, the Standard & Poorchr500 Index, the world price of gold and the exchange rate of the dollar and the euro as economic factors, the difficulty of mining, the number of daily transactions, the daily number of circulating Bitcoin and Ethereum as technical factors, The variables of the number of daily tweets related to Bitcoin or Ethereum and the number of daily searches of Bitcoin or Ethereum in Google have been examined as social factors. The time period for Bitcoin is from 2014 to 2020 and for Ethereum from 2016 to 2020. The research method is applied and the statistical population of the research includes two cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The econometric method used to study the effect of high factors on the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum in the short-run and long-run periods is OLS and VECM. Among the factors studied, the world price of gold has the greatest impact on the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum.On the other hand, in the short run, the exchange rate of the dollar and the euro and the world price of gold have a negative relationship with the value of cryptocurrencies.