Studying How Cryptocurrency Development Characteristics in GitHub Affect Its Market Price and Developer Sentiment in Stack Overflow Discussions

Cryptocurrency development has continuous escalation in the past years and holds its presence significantly in open source development. Since, prices of each cryptocurrency are driven by many factors, we are interested in investigating how various characteristics of cryptocurrency's codebase development affect market capitalization price. We conduct a study on a panel dataset containing a year of daily observations of development activity, popularity, and market capitalization for over two hundred open source cryptocurrencies. Stack Overflow (SO) remains the most popular Q&A forum for software developers. We mine SO data to explore the hot cryptocurrency topics and study the sentiment of cryptocurrency discussions. Our results demonstrate 1) using Granger causality analysis, we find no convincing evidence of "predictive" relationship between software development metrics and market price except for Ethereum; 2) developers express positive sentiment in SO discussions; 3) the extracted keywords from SO discussions prevail the hot topics the developers discuss about.