Using the Crypto Fear & Greed Index and Bitcoin daily data, sentiment extremity predicts excess uncertainty beyond realized volatility. Extreme fear and extreme greed regimes exhibit significantly higher spreads than neutral periods -- the "extremity premium." Extended validation on the full Fear & Greed history (2018--2026, N = 2,896) confirms the finding: within-volatility-quintile comparisons show a premium ($p < 0.001$, pooled volatility-demeaned Cohen's $d = 0.21$ -- a post-hoc, exploratory test, as the pre-specified within-quintile endpoint does not survive multiple-testing correction; raw pooled extreme-vs-neutral $d = 0.40$), Granger causality runs from uncertainty to spreads (primary-sample $F = 12.79$; the extended-sample $F = 211$ is partly mechanical, sharing a high-low input with the spread measure), and placebo tests reject the null ($p < 0.0001$). The effect replicates on Ethereum and across 6 of 7 market cycles. However, the premium is sensitive to functional form: regression controls absorb regime effects, while nonparametric stratification preserves them. We interpret this as evidence that sentiment extremity captures volatility-regime interactions not fully represented by parametric controls -- consistent with, but not conclusively separable from, the F&G Index's embedded volatility component. An agent-based model is included as an illustrative device that reproduces the pattern qualitatively; because its spread-uncertainty link is coded rather than emergent, it does no inferential work (the reported moment-matching test validates a separate simplified model, not the full agent specification), and the inferential weight rests entirely on the empirical analysis. The results suggest that intensity, not direction, drives uncertainty-linked liquidity withdrawal in cryptocurrency markets, though identifying "pure" sentiment effects from volatility remains open.
We document stable cross-asset patterns in cryptocurrency limit-order-book microstructure: the same engineered order book and trade features exhibit remarkably similar predictive importance and SHAP dependence shapes across assets spanning an order of magnitude in market capitalization (BTC, LTC, ETC, ENJ, ROSE). The data covers Binance Futures perpetual contract order books and trades on 1-second frequency starting from January 1st, 2022 up to October 12th, 2025. Using a unified CatBoost modeling pipeline with a direction-aware GMADL objective and time-series cross validation, we show that feature rankings and partial effects are stable across assets despite heterogeneous liquidity and volatility. We connect these SHAP structures to microstructure theory (order flow imbalance, spread, and adverse selection) and validate tradability via a conservative top-of-book taker backtest as well as fixed depth maker backtest. Our primary novelty is a robustness analysis of a major flash crash, where the divergent performance of our taker and maker strategies empirically validates classic microstructure theories of adverse selection and highlights the systemic risks of algorithmic trading. Our results suggest a portable microstructure representation of short-horizon returns and motivate universal feature libraries for crypto markets.
The meme coin ecosystem has grown into one of the most active yet least observable segments of the cryptocurrency market, characterized by extreme churn, minimal project commitment, and widespread fraudulent behavior. While countless meme coins are deployed across multiple blockchains, they rely heavily on off-chain web and social infrastructure to signal legitimacy. These very signals are largely absent from existing datasets, which are often limited to single-chain data or lack the multimodal artifacts required for comprehensive risk modeling. To address this gap, we introduce MemeChain, a large-scale, open-source, cross-chain dataset comprising 34,988 meme coins across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, and Base. MemeChain integrates on-chain data with off-chain artifacts, including website HTML source code, token logos, and linked social media accounts, enabling multimodal and forensic study of meme coin projects. Analysis of the dataset shows that visual branding is frequently omitted in low-effort deployments, and many projects lack a functional website. Moreover, we quantify the ecosystem's extreme volatility, identifying 1,801 tokens (5.15%) that cease all trading activity within just 24 hours of launch. By providing unified cross-chain coverage and rich off-chain context, MemeChain serves as a foundational resource for research in financial forensics, multimodal anomaly detection, and automated scam prevention in the meme coin ecosystem.
Prediction markets offer a natural testbed for trading agents: contracts have binary payoffs, prices can be interpreted as probabilities, and realized performance depends critically on market microstructure, fees, and settlement risk. We introduce PredictionMarketBench, a SWE-bench-style benchmark for evaluating algorithmic and LLM-based trading agents on prediction markets via deterministic, event-driven replay of historical limit-order-book and trade data. PredictionMarketBench standardizes (i) episode construction from raw exchange streams (orderbooks, trades, lifecycle, settlement), (ii) an execution-realistic simulator with maker/taker semantics and fee modeling, and (iii) a tool-based agent interface that supports both classical strategies and tool-calling LLM agents with reproducible trajectories. We release four Kalshi-based episodes spanning cryptocurrency, weather, and sports. Baseline results show that naive trading agents can underperform due to transaction costs and settlement losses, while fee-aware algorithmic strategies remain competitive in volatile episodes.
10.2 billion passengers forecasted in 2026; 18.8 billion by 2045, confirming sustained long-term demand Montreal, 28 January 2026 – Airports Council International (ACI) World today released its World Airport Traffic Forecasts 2025–2054, the industry’s most comprehensive and authoritative outlook on global airport traffic. Key highlights Global passenger traffic forecasted to reach 10.2 billion in 2026 (+3.9% YoY). Long-term demand…
It is well known that reusing cryptocurrency addresses undermines privacy. This also applies if the same addresses are used in different cryptocurrencies. Nevertheless, cross-chain address reuse appears to be a recurring phenomenon, especially in EVM-based designs. Previous works performed either direct address matching, or basic format conversion, to identify such cases. However, seemingly incompatible address formats e.g., in Bitcoin and Ethereum, can also be derived from the same public keys, since they rely on the same cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we therefore focus on the underlying public keys to discover reuse within, as well as across, different cryptocurrency networks, enabling us to also match incompatible address formats. Specifically, we analyze key reuse across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Zcash and Tron. Our results reveal that cryptographic keys are extensively and actively reused across these networks, negatively impacting both privacy and security of their users. We are hence the first to expose and quantify cross-chain key reuse between UTXO and account-based cryptocurrencies. Moreover, we devise novel clustering methods across these different cryptocurrency networks that do not rely on heuristics and instead link entities by their knowledge of the underlying secret key.
How can populations of learners develop coordinated, diverse behaviors without explicit communication or diversity incentives? We demonstrate that competition alone is sufficient to induce emergent specialization -- learners spontaneously partition into specialists for different environmental regimes through competitive dynamics, consistent with ecological niche theory. We introduce the NichePopulation algorithm, a simple mechanism combining competitive exclusion with niche affinity tracking. Validated across six real-world domains (cryptocurrency trading, commodity prices, weather forecasting, solar irradiance, urban traffic, and air quality), our approach achieves a mean Specialization Index of 0.75 with effect sizes of Cohen's d > 20. Key findings: (1) At lambda=0 (no niche bonus), learners still achieve SI > 0.30, proving specialization is genuinely emergent; (2) Diverse populations outperform homogeneous baselines by +26.5% through method-level division of labor; (3) Our approach outperforms MARL baselines (QMIX, MAPPO, IQL) by 4.3x while being 4x faster.
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have emerged as a promising approach for zero-shot financial forecasting, demonstrating strong transferability and data efficiency gains. However, their adoption in financial applications is hindered by fundamental limitations in uncertainty quantification: current approaches either rely on restrictive distributional assumptions, conflate different sources of uncertainty, or lack principled calibration mechanisms. While recent TSFMs employ sophisticated techniques such as mixture models, Student's t-distributions, or conformal prediction, they fail to address the core challenge of providing theoretically-grounded uncertainty decomposition. For the very first time, we present a novel transformer-based probabilistic framework, ProbFM (probabilistic foundation model), that leverages Deep Evidential Regression (DER) to provide principled uncertainty quantification with explicit epistemic-aleatoric decomposition. Unlike existing approaches that pre-specify distributional forms or require sampling-based inference, ProbFM learns optimal uncertainty representations through higher-order evidence learning while maintaining single-pass computational efficiency. To rigorously evaluate the core DER uncertainty quantification approach independent of architectural complexity, we conduct an extensive controlled comparison study using a consistent LSTM architecture across five probabilistic methods: DER, Gaussian NLL, Student's-t NLL, Quantile Loss, and Conformal Prediction. Evaluation on cryptocurrency return forecasting demonstrates that DER maintains competitive forecasting accuracy while providing explicit epistemic-aleatoric uncertainty decomposition. This work establishes both an extensible framework for principled uncertainty quantification in foundation models and empirical evidence for DER's effectiveness in financial applications.
This paper proposes a task-agnostic discovery layer for multivariate time series that constructs a relational hypothesis graph over entities without assuming linearity, stationarity, or a downstream objective. The method learns window-level sequence representations using an unsupervised sequence-to-sequence autoencoder, aggregates these representations into entity-level embeddings, and induces a sparse similarity network by thresholding a latent-space similarity measure. This network is intended as an analyzable abstraction that compresses the pairwise search space and exposes candidate relationships for further investigation, rather than as a model optimized for prediction, trading, or any decision rule. The framework is demonstrated on a challenging real-world dataset of hourly cryptocurrency returns, illustrating how latent similarity induces coherent network structure; a classical econometric relation is also reported as an external diagnostic lens to contextualize discovered edges.
Backed by decades of European and international aviation experience, he will lead ACI World’s strategic direction until 2027 Montreal, 12 January 2026 – Airports Council International (ACI) World welcomes Jost Lammers, CEO of Munich Airport, as Chair of the ACI World Governing Board (WGB) for the 2026–2027 term. Lammers succeeds Candace McGraw, retired CEO of Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG), who…
Multi-agent systems face a fundamental coordination problem: agents must coordinate despite heterogeneous preferences, asymmetric stakes, and imperfect information. When coordination fails, friction emerges -- measurable resistance manifesting as deadlock, thrashing, communication overhead, or conflict. This paper derives a formal framework for analyzing coordination friction from a single axiom: actions affecting agents require authorization in proportion to stakes. From this axiom of consent we establish the kernel triple (alpha, sigma, epsilon) -- alignment, stake, and entropy -- as sufficient statistics for a resource-allocation configuration, and propose a friction functional whose simplest form is F = sigma(1+epsilon)/(1+alpha): friction rises in stakes and entropy and falls in alignment. This form is a phenomenological ansatz, not a theorem, and its empirical adequacy is left open. The Replicator-Optimization Mechanism governs selection over strategies: lower-friction configurations persist longer, making consent-respecting arrangements dynamical attractors rather than normative ideals. We give formal definitions, a measurement apparatus, and machine-checked Lean 4 proofs of the core comparative-statics, with illustrative applications to cryptocurrency governance and political legitimacy.
Cryptocurrency trading increasingly depends on timely integration of heterogeneous web information and market microstructure signals to support short-horizon decision making under extreme volatility. However, existing trading systems struggle to jointly reason over noisy multi-source web evidence while maintaining robustness to rapid price shocks at sub-second timescales. The first challenge lies in synthesizing unstructured web content, social sentiment, and structured OHLCV signals into coherent and interpretable trading decisions without amplifying spurious correlations, while the second challenge concerns risk control, as slow deliberative reasoning pipelines are ill-suited for handling abrupt market shocks that require immediate defensive responses. To address these challenges, we propose WebCryptoAgent, an agentic trading framework that decomposes web-informed decision making into modality-specific agents and consolidates their outputs into a unified evidence document for confidence-calibrated reasoning. We further introduce a decoupled control architecture that separates strategic hourly reasoning from a real-time second-level risk model, enabling fast shock detection and protective intervention independent of the trading loop. Extensive experiments on real-world cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that WebCryptoAgent improves trading stability, reduces spurious activity, and enhances tail-risk handling compared to existing baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/WebCryptoAgent.
Financial markets often appear chaotic, yet ranges are rarely accidental. They emerge from structured interactions between market context and capital conditions. The four-hour timeframe provides a critical lens for observing this equilibrium zone where institutional positioning, leveraged exposure, and liquidity management converge. Funding mechanisms, especially in perpetual futures, act as disciplinary forces that regulate trader behavior, impose economic costs, and shape directional commitment. When funding aligns with the prevailing 4H context, price expansion becomes possible; when it diverges, compression and range-bound behavior dominate. Ranges therefore represent controlled balance rather than indecision, reflecting strategic positioning by informed participants. Understanding how 4H context and funding operate as market governors is essential for interpreting cryptocurrency price action as a rational, power-mediated process.
According to the advent of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, many investments and businesses are now conducted online through cryptocurrencies. Among them, Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to make transactions secure, transparent, traceable, and immutable. It also exhibits significant price fluctuations and performance, which has attracted substantial attention, especially in financial sectors. Consequently, a wide range of investors and individuals have turned to investing in the cryptocurrency market. One of the most important challenges in economics is price forecasting for future trades. Cryptocurrencies are no exception, and investors are looking for methods to predict prices; various theories and methods have been proposed in this field. This paper presents a new deep model, called \emph{Parallel Gated Recurrent Units} (PGRU), for cryptocurrency price prediction. In this model, recurrent neural networks forecast prices in a parallel and independent way. The parallel networks utilize different inputs, each representing distinct price-related features. Finally, the outputs of the parallel networks are combined by a neural network to forecast the future price of cryptocurrencies. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model achieves mean absolute percentage errors (MAPE) of 3.243% and 2.641% for window lengths 20 and 15, respectively. Our method therefore attains higher accuracy and efficiency with fewer input data and lower computational cost compared to existing methods.
Backtests of cryptocurrency perpetual futures are sensitive to execution timing, funding alignment, trading costs, and reuse of evaluation windows during parameter search. In high-friction markets, attractive results may therefore reflect hidden implementation choices as much as signal quality. Using BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, SOL/USDT, and AVAX/USDT perpetual contracts, this study examines whether an auditable execution-aware configuration-selection pipeline can reduce performance overestimation and expose parameter fragility more clearly than naive one-stage tuning. This paper proposes AutoQuant, an expert-system-style decision-support framework for configuration selection. AutoQuant encodes strict execution timing, funding visibility, cost realism, and feasibility constraints as explicit rules; combines Bayesian search with two-stage screening across windows and cost scenarios; and exports deterministic artifacts with accounting-invariant checks for traceability. The resulting governance protocol selects and documents configurations within a pre-specified signal family under strict semantics. Empirically, fee-only and zero-cost backtests materially inflate apparent performance relative to fully costed runs with funding and slippage. Two-stage screening does not guarantee higher returns; in the BTC anchor case and several replications, it more often surfaces lower-drawdown or less extreme alternatives under identical strict semantics. Same-budget optimizer comparison, module and screening-policy ablations, funding-rule diagnostics, inferential checks, cross-asset replications, and third-party replay checks position AutoQuant as auditable validation infrastructure for configuration selection under explicit execution and cost assumptions. The experiments use small-account simulations under linear costs and exclude market impact and institutional capacity constraints.