Every major blockchain project has an active community nowadays. The community is an indispensable part of the whole ecosystem and through social media platforms, its members are constantly communicating and interacting with the project team, other community members and connected outsiders. Such behaviors play a significant role in the development of the blockchain project, however, very little research has been carried out to study them. VeChain has identified the importance of such research and is teaming up with Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian and his team at the Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College.

There are many questions we could ask in the research. One of most obvious ones is whether the community activities affect the market price of the corresponding cryptocurrency. To answer the question, the team collected public data from Reddit for dozens of top blockchain projects and used them together with price histories to predict the up and down of the next-day prices. The research has resulted in a paper accepted by the IEEE Blockchain-2019 conference.

From Table I in the paper, as shown above, we can see that the community activities have a certain impact on the cryptocurrency of VeChain since features from its Reddit data, represented by Capital 'R', contributed to the best feature set used for prediction. However, its price is also affected by features computed from historical price data (represented by 'P') and those from global economic data (represented by 'E'). Surprisingly, we can see projects such like TRON and EOS whose prices were best predicted solely by their social media data, indicating the significance of the impact of their community activities to their market performance.

With the help of more sophisticated social media data collected and acquired in near future, the team would be able to answer more interesting questions not only related to the crypto market but to the actual development of blockchain projects.