Time: 13:00-15:00 (UK Time), Wednesday, 11 May 2022
Presenter: Prof. Sheri Markose, University of Essex, UK
Chair: Prof. Victor Murinde, SOAS University of London
Online venue: Click here to join the seminar on Microsoft Teams (For any inquiry about how to join the online seminar, please contact Dr. Athina Petropoulou: ap102@soas.ac.uk)

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies (CCs) that are primarily held as speculative assets bring about disintermediation effects by sucking in household savings and leveraged funds to fuel price booms. These bubbles are underpinned by national fiat money and hence the diversion of funds from other investments and the loss of liquidity should be monitored carefully by central banks. We develop an agent based based model calibrated to data to quantify the drain on societal resources to finance the speculative booms followed by busts in CC prices. The CC transaction networks are found to have a characteristic topology in that 70% of the CC wallet addresses only have a single incoming flow of funds and no outgoing links to designate transaction payments. The latter are predicted to fall even further during the run up to a CC bubble as investors hoard the CCs and not spend them.

Presenter

Prof. Sheri Markose

Sheri Markose has a PhD from London School of Economics and is Professor of Economics at University of Essex, UK. As founder director (2002-2009) of the Centre For Computational Finance and Economic Agents (CCFEA), Sheri pioneered a multi-disciplinary curriculum covering Agent based Computational Economics, Complexity Sciences, FinTech and Digital Economy.  As Senior Consultant (2011-2014) at Financial Stability Unit of the Reserve Bank of India, she headed the project for the digital mapping of the Indian financial system for systemic risk management. Sheri has been a consultant to the IMF and an academic advisor on the G20 OTC Derivatives Reforms. Her recent work on Novelty Production in a Nash Equilibrium of a digital adversarial game, followed by a publication on the digital foundations of genomic intelligence based on the foundational work of Gödel-Turing-Post has led to an Associate Editorship of Frontiers of Computational Intelligence: AI and Robotics and Keynote talks in 2019 at Carnegie Mellon Bio-ICT Conference and at the University of Sydney Complexity Symposium.