A Dataset of Coordinated Cryptocurrency-Related Social Media Campaigns

The paper describing this dataset can be found here: Zilius, K., Spiliotopoulos, T., & van Moorsel, A. (2023). A Dataset of Coordinated Cryptocurrency-Related Social Media Campaigns. arXiv, 2301.06601. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06601 Abstract The rise in adoption of cryptoassets has brought many new and inexperienced investors in the cryptocurrency space. These investors can be disproportionally influenced by information they receive online, and particularly from social media. This paper presents a dataset of crypto-related bounty events and the users that participate in them. These events coordinate social media campaigns to create artificial ”hype” around a crypto project in order to influence the price of its token. The dataset consists of information about 15.8K cross-media bounty events, 185K participants, 10M forum comments and 82M social media URLs collected from the Bounties(Altcoins) subforum of the BitcoinTalk online forum from May 2014 to December 2022. We describe the data collection and the data processing methods employed, we present a basic characterization of the dataset, and we describe potential research opportunities afforded by the dataset across many disciplines.This work is supported by UK Research and Innovation through the Strategic Priority Fund as part of the Protecting Citizens Online programme. Grant title: AGENCY: Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms. Grant reference: EP/W032481/2. Further support was received by the EPSRC Centre for Digital Citizens. Grant reference: EP/T022582/1