Intraday regime switching volatility dynamics of bitcoin liquidity

Technological developments are followed in the form of speed and new products in the large finance ecosystem. Particularly, we can easily observe the increasing importance of both new products and speed in the cryptocurrency markets. Examining the liquidity in cryptocurrency markets, which are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, draws attention as an important issue. Liquidity, in simple terms, refers to the ease of converting a financial instrument into cash. Bid-ask spread of a financial instrument is also considered as a measure of liquidity. This study employs Markov switching GARCH (MSGARCH) models to investigate the intraday volatility of the liquidity of Bitcoin under low volatile and high volatile regime periods. The study analyses the 5 minutes’ intraday bid-ask spread by different types of MSGARCH models with different numbers of regimes. The analysed period 01.01.2019 – 06.29.2021 contains 52,548 observations. The first results of the study provide evidence that low and high volatility periods can be explained by different models such as MS EGARCH, MS TGARCH, and MS GJRGARCH. Secondly, the two-regime MSGARCH and MS GJR GARCH models are the best models for explaining low and high volatility periods of intra-day Bitcoin liquidity.