DARPA-Funded Study Looks at How Crypto Chats Spread on Reddit

Published on by Coindesk | Published on

A U.S. Department of Energy science lab has been studying studying how well three popular cryptos performed in Reddit chats.

According to a press release provided exclusively to CoinDesk, data analysts at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory measured the speed and scale of discussions related to three cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, ethereum, and monero, on Reddit.

The PNNL study, which was notably funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also showed that people responded more quickly to bitcoin posts, taking an average of 11 minutes to start gathering comments.

Discussions on bitcoin were also the fastest to grow, followed by ethereum, then monero.

In terms of how long a post gets discussed, it was monero that came top with the largest median lifetime.

Ethereum posts, on the other hand, had the largest possible lifetimes, while bitcoin discussions had the lowest median lifetime of the three coins.

The PNNL study, led by Dr. Svitlana Volkova, was launched to better understand online communication patterns and develop a quantitative framework for how such information propagates, according to the press release.

PNNL further said that the analysis presented in its study could be used to inform a variety of financial market analytics.

The lab intends to expand its research on the spread of cryptocurrency discussions with other viral trends, such as the spread of computer vulnerabilities and misinformation.

The PNNL study was presented at the Web Conference 2019 in San Francisco, California on May 17 and can be found online here.

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