CryptoComparator: A Visual Analytics Environment for Cryptocurrencies Analysis

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies are a novel phenomenon in the finance world that is gaining more attention from the general public, banks, investors, and lately also academic research. A characteristic of cryptocurrencies is to be the target of investments that, due to the volatility of most of the cryptocurrencies, tends to be at high risk and behave very differently from classic currencies. A way of reducing this risk is to look at the history of existing cryptocurrencies and compare them in order to spot promising trends for increased gain. This paper introduces CryptoComparator, a Visual Analytics tool designed for allowing analysis of correlations and trends of cryptocurrencies. The system exploits an initial proposal for a double elliptic graph layout, reconfigurable with three different ordering functions, in order to support fast visual search of cryptocurrencies by correlation strength. One usecase developed with a domain expert in cryptocurrency financial activities demonstrates qualitatively the usage of the system.