Market Efficiency in a Changing Asset Population: Mobility, Entry, and Survival over Cryptocurrency's Full History

Abstract: Weak-form efficiency implies symmetry restrictions on the Markov chain governing movement across the cryptocurrency capitalisation distribution. We test them on the full listed population: 8,970 assets, 690 weekly cross-sections, 2013 to 2026, with entry, exit and survival observed rather than inferred. Symmetry is rejected in every era, but the asymmetry falls by seventy percent, and what converged is entry-driven compositional churn rather than coins' own valuations. The bottom decile earns 27.5% per week on paper and nothing among assets that trade, on capacity of $293,000. Compensation for neglect exists precisely where trading does not.