Editorial to special issue “Hidden market linkages between Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and financial markets: Evidence from high-frequency data and higher-order moments” in financial innovation

The cryptomarket has evolved into a complex system of different types of cryptoassets, each playing an important role within the system. With specific features, opportunities, and risks. Studying their apparent and hidden linkages and general connectedness not only inside the system but also the linkages to the outer markets, being it either the traditional financial markets or the macroeconomic and monetary indicators and variables, plays a crucial role in understanding the market, managing risks, and aiming for profitable opportunities. The cryptomarkets are far from being simply Bitcoin or even just the most popular and capitalised cryptocurrencies and tokens which might have been the case just a few years back. Now, they comprise stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), derivatives, as well as rich services in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space such as lending and borrowing platforms, liquidity provision, farming and harvesting, and gaming to name the most prominent ones. All these subareas are highly interconnected and mostly highly leveraged, which increases systemic risks and produces space for possible liquidation cascades. The still rather recent implosion of the Terra-Luna ecosystem clearly uncovered how leveraged the system really is, with many large liqui-dations and project collapses being directly connected to the mayhem that followed. As the alleged fraud of the FTX exchange is still being unveiled in its details, the complexity that needs to be understood is clearly in the spotlight. However, it is not only the inter-linkages within the system that are essential in grasping the market dynamics. Even if the cryptomarkets could have been seen as rather detached from the traditional (financial) markets, the pandemic era and the follow-up characteristic by unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimuli have shown that cryptomarkets are being more and more integrated with the real economy. This structural change needs to be properly studied and analysed. The presented special issue “Hidden market linkages between Bitcoin, crypto-currencies and financial markets: Evidence from high-frequency data and higher-order moments” collects studies looking at the linkages from various perspectives, following