Can gold-backed cryptocurrencies have dynamic hedging and safe-haven abilities against DeFi and NFT assets?

Abstract

Given that the interconnections of NFT and DeFi digital assets with other stablecoins still not sufficiently studied, this paper is two-fold. We first examine the dynamic conditional correlation between gold-backed cryptocurrencies and NFTs and DeFi assets during the period 02/11/2021-05/01/2023. We thereafter assess the diversification potential of gold-backed cryptocurrencies against NFTand DeFi. To this end, we use the time-varying Student's copula to investigate the cross-markets linkages among different assets in dynamic fashion. We afterwards compute the optimal hedging ratios and effectiveness index to better explore the effectiveness of portfolio risk management. Our findings clearly show that the degree of dependence between gold-backed cryptocurrencies and NFT and DeFi tokens tends to vary over time. Our results also display that gold-backed cryptocurrencies act as suitable hedging (or diversifying) assets during normal times. Nevertheless, such assets can be considered as robust safe havens during the 2022 bear market for the most of NFT and DeFi assets. More specifically, PAXG and PMGT are found to be the best safe haven instruments for both NFT and DeFi tokens. DGX also serves as safe-haven assets for some NFT and DeFi assets, but with a lower risk-mitigation capacity compared to PAXG and PMGT. In most cases, DGX tends to act as a strong diversifier. Its hedging feature is only recorded for the NFT Protocol (xNFT) and the DeFi token Chainlink (LINK). Our results are of particular interest to investors and portfolio managers who search for safe havens to mitigate the risk of their NFT and DeFi portfolios.