Document Type
Thesis
First Faculty Advisor
Dr. Suhong Li
Second Faculty Advisor
Dr. Tingting Zhao
Keywords
non-fungible tokens; social media; NFTs; blockchain; cryptocurrency; Twitter
Publisher
Bryant University
Rights Management
CC-BY-NC-ND; CC-BY; CC-BY-SA; CC-BY-ND; CC-BY-NC-SA; CC-BY-NC
Abstract
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a peer-to-peer type of blockchain technology which is a unique digital asset transferred completely over the internet (Sarmah, 2018). NFT's have become an integral component of many financial and art communities in recent years, boasting millions of consumers (Regner, 2019). Along with the non-fungible token technology, social media has become a crucial aspect of communication in society, with many consumers of the NFT industry communicating and expressing opinions of the industry on different social media platforms. Considering the rise in popularity of NFTs in recent years, this study aims to gain a deeper understanding of the non-fungible token community and industry through an in-depth analysis through social media discussion. Based on 6.64 million Tweets collected in this study, it can be concluded that there is a significant number of tweets that had a greater positive sentiment, compared to a negative sentiment, with the overall positive sentiment being about 40% greater than the negative sentiment. Along with identifying sentiment, we were also able to target three common emerging topics using topic modelling: Giveaways, Token Creation, and Community Interaction. Through all this analysis, it was discovered that the NFT community on twitter had an abundant number of bot accounts.
