Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

Chapter 9

The Evolution of Cryptoasset Market Behavior

In the previous chapter, we discussed what differentiated asset classes from one another. We identified economic characteristics, liquidity and trading volume profiles, and marketplace behavior, as key differentiators. The economic characteristics covered in Chapter 8 are largely well defined at the launch of an asset, though any given cryptoasset’s economic characteristics may evolve more than a stock, and certainly more than a bond, given the nature of its open-source software.

Inarguably, the liquidity and trading volume profiles along with the marketplace behavior of an asset class—and individual examples within an asset class—mature considerably over time. For example, in 1602 when ...