Stablecoins as a tool to mitigate the downside risk of cryptocurrency portfolios

This paper empirically assesses the ability of three putative stablecoins (two dollar-backed, Tether and USD Coin; and one gold-backed, Digix Gold) to mitigate the risk of facing severe losses (downside risk) of a traditional cryptocurrency portfolio. There are institutional features that induce cry...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Díaz, Antonio, Esparcia, Carlos, Huélamo, Diego
Tipo de documento: artigo
Data de publicação:2022
País:España
Recursos:Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
Repositório:RUIdeRA. Repositorio Institucional de la UCLM
OAI Identifier:oai:ruidera.uclm.es:10578/36312
Acesso em linha:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.najef.2022.101838
https://hdl.handle.net/10578/36312
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Co-skewness
Co-kurtosis
Cryptocurrency
Modified VaR
Portfolio allocation
Stablecoin
Descrição
Resumo:This paper empirically assesses the ability of three putative stablecoins (two dollar-backed, Tether and USD Coin; and one gold-backed, Digix Gold) to mitigate the risk of facing severe losses (downside risk) of a traditional cryptocurrency portfolio. There are institutional features that induce cryptoinvestors to use stablecoins as diversifiers instead of withdrawing dollars or adding assets traditionally considered as safe havens, such as gold, crude oil, etc. Stablecoins, however, are not as stable as their name and collateralized peg suggest. A monthly rebalance experiment is conducted over an out-of-sample period considering higher order conditional moments when dynamically measuring the tail risk of cryptocurrency portfolios. The empirical evidence shows that the low conditional correlations of dollar-backed stablecoins with cryptocurrency portfolios make them particularly suitable as a hedge for crypto investors. It also shows that all stablecoins considered have high diversification capacities by systematically reducing portfolio tail risk.