Reflections of public perception of Russia-Ukraine conflict and Metaverse on the financial outlook of Metaverse coins: Fresh evidence from Reddit sentiment analysis

The present work endeavors to thoroughly examine the dependence of daily closing prices of Metaverse coins on external social media sentiment on Russia's military invasion of Ukraine and the potential benefits of Metaverse technology. We collate the worldwide media chatter on the Ukraine war and uncover the dynamic association with four Metaverse coins by applying wavelet coherence analysis. Subsequently, we systematically estimate the sentiment of discussions on the Reddit community on two topics, namely, the Russia-Ukraine Conflict and Metaverse, to gauge their impact separately on the chosen tokens. Nonlinear association mining and forecasting exercises are carried out to comprehend the predictability of the Metaverse financial assets using the respective sentiment components. The predictive framework utilizes Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-tuned Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBR) for feature transformation and fetching forecasts, respectively. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are utilized to interpret the prediction process for unveiling the feature contributions. The findings suggest that the dependence between the Metaverse coins and media chatter on the Russia-Ukraine war primarily prevails in short and medium-run scales, and the Reddit sentiments on the same and Metaverse can be effectively leveraged for estimating future figures and trends.