Author: Ravi Kumar Bommisetti
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies have developed from a peer-to-peer electronic cash proposal into a heterogeneous ecosystem of volatile investment assets, programmable settlement networks, stable coins, decentralised finance (DeFi), tokenised claims and governance experiments. This review integrates research on market efficiency and price formation, portfolio diversification and financial spillovers, user adoption, regulation and illicit finance, protocol security, and environmental sustainability. Rather than treating cryptocurrency as a single asset class, it distinguishes protocol design, market infrastructure, token economics and institutional context as interacting layers. The literature indicates that cryptocurrency returns exhibit time-varying volatility, heavy tails, structural breaks and episodic dependence with conventional markets; diversification benefits are conditional on horizon, market regime and the chosen asset. Adoption is shaped not only by perceived usefulness and ease of use but also by trust, perceived risk, financial literacy, network effects and the credibility of legal and custodial arrangements. Decentralisation can reduce dependence on a single intermediary, yet does not eliminate concentration in mining or staking, stablecoin reserves, exchange custody, governance, or software dependencies. Regulation therefore faces a calibration problem: protecting users and financial integrity without assuming that all crypto-assets perform the same economic function. Environmental impacts vary substantially by consensus mechanism and electricity mix, making blanket claims about all cryptocurrencies analytically weak. A transparent quantitative synthesis protocol is proposed, including study coding, effect-size harmonisation, heterogeneity assessment and robustness checks. Since a verified study-level extraction dataset was not provided, numerical claims are limited to explicitly identify descriptive evidence-map scores rather than pooled effect estimates. The review concludes with a research agenda centered on causal identification, cross-jurisdictional regulatory evaluation, on-chain/off-chain measurement, stablecoin stress transmission, cybersecurity externalities and credible sustainability accounting.
Keywords: cryptocurrency; Bitcoin; Ethereum; market efficiency; volatility; adoption; regulation; DeFi; stablecoins; cybersecurity; sustainability; systematic review.