How the Cryptocurrency Discourse is Changing: A Textual Analysis

Abstract

The paper aims to retrace the academic discourse on cryptocurrencies from 2015 to 2022 by treating it as a lexical unicum that evolves over time. The purpose is to understand what themes have emerged and how they have changed the discourse on cryptocurrencies. We used a three-step methodology. The first consists of text mining that allows us to create, from 1057 academic articles on the subject, the matrix containing the frequencies of words/n-grams. In a second step, lexical analysis is enriched by correspondence analysis, a useful tool to measure the "distance" and evolution of academic discourse and to identify significant content discontinuity. Finally, the causal analysis addresses the ultimate goal of understanding whether it is possible to define future developments in the cryptocurrency discourse, whether it will absorb instances from outside or remain focused on the prevailing themes to date. The identification and application of a method to analyze the evolution of the cryptocurrency discourse allowed us to distinguish at least two distinct phases characterized by specific content and cryptocurrencies.