Towards a Crypto Asset Taxonomy: A Text Classification-based Approach

There are over 1900 cryptocurrencies trading in the market as of September 2020 and the number is rapidly growing. In the current crypto scene, cryptocurrencies are seen as investment vehicles by many, yet every crypto asset is designed to operate in a specific sector within a pre-defined business model. In addition to sector, there are various characteristics and factors that differentiate one crypto asset from another. Crypto investors can leverage these factors and characteristics and use these indicators to create different trading strategies. In our work, in order to guide the decision-making process for investors and to help them analyse crypto assets in a holistic manner, we classify the crypto assets under various characteristics, aiming towards a crypto asset taxonomy. In this paper, we focus on automated annotation of the cryptocurrencies in terms of sector, transaction anonymity and asset type through the public information. Though the information we utilise is public, it is scattered around quite a vast number of sources in different formats. Therefore, we generated an annotated dataset by collecting information from various sources. We utilised several supervised learning algorithms, including both traditional ones and more recent neural models, and analyzed the classification performance for the three aspects.