**1. Introduction**

Digital cryptocurrencies have rapidly entered the public view in recent years, and their market trading scale continues to expand. As a representative species in the cryptocurrency market, bitcoin has exhibited dramatic volatility since its inception, and its price fluctuations have long been a concern for both academia and practitioners. Due to the soaring price of bitcoin in recent years, more investors around the world are entering the bitcoin market, expecting to make profits while lacking a deep understanding of the price formation mechanism of bitcoin and its asset properties, thus, facing huge investment risks. To establish an analytical framework about the price formation mechanism of bitcoin, it is first necessary to define whether bitcoin is a risk or a safe-haven asset. Some argue that because bitcoin is completely decentralized and not controlled by a traditional central bank and because bitcoin supply is limited by its own protocol design to a fixed total of 21 million coins, bitcoin has a similar anti-inflation value to gold and is a safe-haven asset. However, there are also arguments that the bitcoin market is highly speculative and that there is a clear positive correlation between the prices of bitcoin and various risk assets, thus, making it more of a risk asset in nature.

Is bitcoin a risk asset or a safe-haven asset? What are the linkages between bitcoin and major global assets? What are the dynamics of these linkages over time? This paper aims to explore the asset properties of bitcoin from the perspective of its linkage with traditional financial assets. We use the asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation (ADCC)-GARCH approach to examine the dynamic correlations between bitcoin and various traditional assets in different time frequency dimensions and further explore bitcoin's diversification, hedging and safe-haven properties for each asset based on the dynamic correlations between bitcoin and these assets. Our analysis not only helps to further clarify the price

formation mechanism of bitcoin and its role in portfolio management and helps investors to reasonably hold digital cryptocurrencies for investment, but also helps policymakers improve the dynamic monitoring and risk management of the cryptocurrency market represented by bitcoin.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the relevant literature. Section 3 uses the ADCC-GARCH approach to quantitatively measure the dynamic correlation between bitcoin and various traditional financial assets in different time-frequency dimensions. Section 4 further identifies bitcoin's risk diversification, hedging and safe-haven capabilities for each traditional asset. Section 5 concludes.
