HNDS-R: Understanding Drivers of Trust in Cryptocurrency Using Big Data and Ethnographic Approaches

The cryptocurrency market represents an increasing share of global economic markets, yet is considerably more volatile. This volatility is shaped in part by the trust that cryptocurrency users place in the cryptocurrency market. Accordingly, crises in cryptocurrency markets offer critical windows for understanding relationships between trust, markets, and regulatory actions. This project leverages crises and recoveries in cryptocurrency markets to investigate impacts on the levels of and underlying rationales for adjusting trust based on market dynamics. Project investigators attend to important variation across stakeholders and disseminate research findings broadly to policymakers, regulators, industry professionals, and scientists. The project also provides training for undergraduate and graduate students in scientific methods of data collection and analysis and includes underrepresented students and scholars in scientific research. The project tests several non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that suggest that trust can be maintained i) when perturbations in cryptocurrency markets are seen as acute versus long-term, ii) when investments are seen as more versus less game-like, iii) when participation in communities facilitate trust; and iv) due to variation in underlying beliefs in cryptocurrency market systems. A unique collaboration between anthropologists and researchers in technology management and computer science is leveraged to synthesize theory and method to motivate cutting-edge analyses of large-scale data capturing broad and deep relationships between trust and stated cryptocurrency market involvement. Specifically, the investigators combine big data methods, using natural language processing analysis of social media data surrounding catastrophic market downturns, with ethnographic methods, including netnography, participant observation, surveys and interviews. Such longitudinal analyses provide unique insights into the ways trust in market systems shift over time and in relation to individual characteristics and broader regulatory scenarios. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.