Cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular in recent years attracting the attention of the media, academia, investors, speculators, regulators, and governments worldwide. This paper focuses on modelling the volatility dynamics of eight most popular cryptocurrencies in terms of their market capitalization for the period starting from 7th August 2015 to 1st August 2018. In particular, we consider the following cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Moreno, Dash, Stellar and NEM. The GARCH-type models assuming different distributions for the innovations term are fitted to cryptocurrencies data and their adequacy is evaluated using diagnostic tests. The selected optimal GARCH-type models are then used to simulate out-of-sample volatility forecasts which are in turn utilized to estimate the one-day-ahead VaR forecasts. The empirical results demonstrate that the optimal in-sample GARCH-type specifications vary from the selected out-of-sample VaR forecasts models for all cryptocurrencies. Whilst the empirical results do not guarantee a straightforward preference among GARCH-type models, the asymmetric GARCH models with long memory property and heavy-tailed innovations distributions overall perform better for all cryptocurrencies.
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