The research at the Centre for Digital Finance focusses on two broad research areas:
Cryptocurrencies, DeFi and FinTech: Blockchain technology is driving the evolution of new financial assets. We study the risk and contagion properties of these new assets, as well as their effect on portfolios of assets and on existing financial functions. We explore other potential uses for Blockchain technology, the future of digital payments systems, environmental issues around Blockchain mining and related ethical issue. We also study cryptocurrency and DeFi governance issues. We scrutinise the structure of DeFi dApps in order to understand how this affects its price dynamics and those of related dApps and cryptocurrencies. Other issues we study include crowdfunding and popular attention related to cryptocurrency environmental impact.
Empirical Research using Cutting Edge Computer Science Tools: We use tools like neural networks, support vector machines and random forests to model and to forecast financial time series. We use post-time-series methods to measure and predict the relationship between high frequency, irregularly spaced price series. We employ Natural Language Processing to obtain numerical measures of sentiment in texts. We use agent based models to run simulations to explore issues like congestion and spillover in financial markets and in the banking system, and to examine the effect of policy options.