The little more than a decade old market for digital assets has already roughly quadrupled from its 2020 year-end value, as investors have gotten more comfortable with established tokens such as Bitcoin and networks like Ethereum and Solana continue to upgrade and attract new functionality. Excitement about the possibilities of decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens is growing, and memecoins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu continue to attract attention.
Like most things with cryptocurrency, regulation comes with hurdles. “There are different agencies that may or may not have jurisdiction to oversee everything,” says Wang. “And it differs state by state.”

Cryptocurrency has come a long way over the last decade, advancing at a lightspeed pace. Value can be stored, transferred and spent in different ways through various assets and solutions, while DeFi has pioneered the way for new borrowing and lending avenues.
Identifying the determinants of asset prices is one of the most important questions in finance. Traditional asset pricing theories are founded on the idea that equity prices should be determined by fundamentals such as earnings (Gordon 1959, Campbell and Shiller 1988). In contrast, the behavioral finance literature posits that prices do not always follow fundamentals due to investor sentiment trading (Shiller 1981, Baker and Wurgler 2006, Stambaugh et al. 2012). Eventually however, equity prices seem to trace their fundamentals (Pa´stor and Veronesi, 2003, 2006, Bartram and Grinblatt 2018).