FINTECH THRUST SEMINAR | Global Public Sentiment on Decentralized Finance: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Geo-tagged Tweets from 150 Countries
Global Public Sentiment on Decentralized Finance: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Geo-tagged Tweets from 150 Countries
Abstract:
In the digital era, blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have revolutionized financial and decentralized systems. Despite their importance, current research frequently overlooks the spatiotemporal variations in public sentiment toward these technologies, thereby limiting the ability to draw macro-level inferences on how these technologies have influenced global public attention, governmental regulations, and economic growth. Recognizing the significance of these variations, this study utilizes Twitter as a primary data source to investigate public attention and sentiment across 150 countries. We analyze over 150 million geo-tagged tweets from the period 2012 to 2022, along with sentiment scores derived from a BERT-based multilingual sentiment classification model initially trained on 7.4 billion geotagged tweets. The study further integrates this data with global cryptocurrency regulation policies and national economic indicators from the World Development Indicators database. Our results uncover significant global variations in sentiment, influenced by economic factors such as GDP per capita, with more developed nations showing greater engagement in discussions, while less developed countries exhibit higher sentiment levels. A geographically weighted regression analysis confirms that the correlation between GDP and tweet engagement intensifies following Bitcoin price surges. Topic modeling reveals that countries within similar economic clusters share comparable discussion trends, whereas diverse clusters focus on different topics. This study underscores the global disparities in public sentiment towards decentralized finance, influenced by economic and regional factors. The implications of these findings are discussed concerning poverty alleviation, cryptocurrency-related crime, and sustainable development. We have made our dataset and code publicly available as open-source on GitHub.
Luyao (Sunshine) Zhang is Assistant Professor of Economics and Senior Research Scientist at the Data Science Research Center at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). Her current research interests lie at the interplay of computational and economic science, focusing on the application of groundbreaking technologies for sustainability, human prosperity, and the advancement of society. These technologies include artificial intelligence, blockchain, and innovative computing. She has an abiding passion for interdisciplinary collaborations, especially for cutting-edge research of both profound insights and practical impact. Her publications appear in economic and computational science journals and conference proceedings for general interest and beyond, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, the World Economy, Nature Research Scientific Data, Springer Nature Social Indicators Research, ACM CCS, AAAI/ACM AIES, ACM CSCW, IEEE S&P, Remote Sensing, Journal of Digital Earth, Data and Information Management. She received Ph.D. in Economics at Ohio State University, supported by Presidential Fellowship and the National Science Foundation (NSF). She graduated from Peking University with a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Math and Applied Math. She holds certificates from the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme as well as from MIT Professional Education in programs such as ‘Blockchain: Disruptive Technology’, ‘Advanced Reinforcement Learning’, ‘Data Engineering’, and ‘Applied Generative AI for Digital Transformation’. She is currently supported by the National Science Foundation in China (NSFC) for her research agenda entitled “Trust Mechanism Design on Blockchain: An Interdisciplinary Approach of Game Theory, Reinforcement Learning, and Human-AI Interactions.” She was awarded the 60 Pioneers in Blockchain Innovation by the National Collegiate Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Innovation Alliance in 2022. Find out more about her at: https://scholars.duke.edu/person/luyao.zhang.