A Dataset of Coordinated Cryptocurrency-Related Social Media Campaigns

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive dataset of cryptocurrency-related social media campaigns, capturing user participation, comments, and URLs, enabling research into online influence and market manipulation in crypto.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale, detailed dataset of crypto bounty campaigns and social media activity, facilitating multidisciplinary research into crypto market dynamics and online influence.

Findings

Dataset includes 15.8K bounty events and 185K participants.

Contains 10 million forum comments and 82 million URLs.

Enables analysis of social media influence on cryptocurrency markets.

Abstract

The rise in adoption of cryptoassets has brought many new and inexperienced investors in the cryptocurrency space. These investors can be disproportionally influenced by information they receive online, and particularly from social media. This paper presents a dataset of crypto-related bounty events and the users that participate in them. These events coordinate social media campaigns to create artificial "hype" around a crypto project in order to influence the price of its token. The dataset consists of information about 15.8K cross-media bounty events, 185K participants, 10M forum comments and 82M social media URLs collected from the Bounties(Altcoins) subforum of the BitcoinTalk online forum from May 2014 to December 2022. We describe the data collection and the data processing methods employed and we present a basic characterization of the dataset. Furthermore, we discuss potential research opportunities afforded by the dataset across many disciplines and we highlight potential novel insights into how the cryptocurrency industry operates and how it interacts with its audience.