(Bloomberg) -- Crypto exchange Binance.US, whose chief executive officer recently resigned, just appointed a new president.
Unlike traditional currencies, cryptocurrencies exist only as a shared digital record of ownership, stored on a blockchain. When a user wants to send cryptocurrency units to another user, they send it to that user’s digital wallet. The transaction isn’t considered final until it has been verified and added to the blockchain through a process called mining. This is also how new cryptocurrency tokens are usually created.

In the meantime, the Indian government is considering a middle path on cryptocurrencies, as it finalises legislation on the virtual asset to be introduced in the upcoming winter session of Parliament. The hard-line stance for an outright ban of cryptos is not being found feasible in view of large investments in such instruments by Indians, and these unregulated virtual currencies are also unlikely to be allowed as a legal tender.
We further explore the significance of cryptocurrency fundamentals at the aggregate market level using traditional asset pricing tests. For this analysis, we construct risk factors that are based on aggregate values of computing power and network. We denote the aggregate computing power factor with ACP and aggregate network factor with ANET. The innovation in constructing these factors is that we express them in cryptocurrency return units following the factor mimicking portfolio approach (Knez et al. 1994, Lamont 2001, Vassalou 2003).