Introductory Blog Post

Johnny Y -

Hello! I’m Johnny Yu, a senior at BASIS Tucson North. This blog will document my journey as I advance my Senior Project investigating the efficacy of utilizing natural language processing to analyze social media in order to predict cryptocurrency price movements. I’ll be focusing on so-called “meme coins” like Dogecoin, which have higher volatility and derive their value from societal “mindshare.” There is significant capital pouring into this market, and as cryptocurrencies become more popular and the “meme economy” grows, NLP may become a critical valuation tool for the fuzzy concepts of “mindshare” and “social support”.

For this project, I will work with my on-site mentor, Professor Mihai Surdeanu, at the University of Arizona to develop a sentiment analysis NLP model for social media threads, potentially using an open-source model from Hugging Face. Then, I’ll select meme coins to analyze, with preference for older coins (so that there’s more data). I’ll acquire data by scraping Reddit and Twitter threads relating to the coin using the Reddit API and Twikit. I’ll then optimize the model for investment performance through trial-and-error. This project will make heavy use of Python coding. To answer my research question, I’ll compare the returns of the algorithm with an ARIMA (statistical forecasting) approach.

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Comments:

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    aditya_s
    Hi Johnny! Your project sounds fascinating! Given that cryptocurrency is becoming more widespread, what relationship do you see meme coins having with non-meme coins? In other words, do you think they will serve different purposes?
    February 14, 2025 at 2:22 pm - Reply
    tesla_l
    Which meme coin do you expect to rise the most in value in the next three months (which meme coin should I invest in)?
    February 14, 2025 at 3:55 pm - Reply
    johnny_y
    I do see them serving different purposes. Cryptocurrencies are very diverse, with Bitcoin essentially serving as digital gold and coins like Ethereum beginning to be used for their smart contract, among others. Meme coins, on the other hand, serve more as representations of "mindshare" and venues for speculation.
    February 17, 2025 at 11:40 am - Reply
    johnny_y
    Not a financial advisor, but generally meme coins with larger market caps are safer investments (lower chance of scams or losing all your money). If you're referring to percentage rise in value, meme coins that 20x (or more) in value tend to rise out of obscurity, so it's difficult to say.
    February 17, 2025 at 11:43 am - Reply

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