Financial markets are showing greater interest in digital assets, with four of the business world’s flagship trading products integrating cryptocurrency data. In the latest step towards crypto integration, NASDAQ GIBS, Bloomberg Terminals, and Thomson Reuters Eikon, the industry-grade financial and trading products for their respective platforms, will now integrate data from CoinMarketCap, allowing traders to track the cryptocurrency markets in real time.
The new data will also be integrated with Börse Stuttgart, the second-largest stock exchange in Germany, as well as on CoinMarketCap’s website.
In a press release, CoinMarketCap revealed two new data indices to be used as market benchmarks for these financial tools. The first, CMC Crypto 200, will track the top two hundred cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. A second will focus only on altcoins: the “CMC Crypto 200 ex BTC Index,” or CMC200EX, which will track the top two hundred cryptocurrencies excluding Bitcoin.
According to CoinMarketCap CEO Brandon Chez, the new indices are expected to help cryptocurrencies expand into the greater financial world. “We are excited to launch and share these indices with the market,” Chez said. “These indices will promote greater accessibility to cryptocurrency data in an easier-to-digest format.”
Bringing Crypto To the Wider World
The new benchmarks are CoinMarketCap’s latest effort to increase mainstream awareness of digital assets. “[W]e believe that the indices are a great way to bring more visibility to the crypto space among the wider financial market,” said Carylyne Chan, CoinMarketCap’s head of Global Marketing.
In addition, Chan said, the site is also working with trading tech firm Vela to provide a data “SuperFeed” for governments and institutions. The SuperFeed will allow these parties to access CoinMarketCap’s data “in a high fidelity manner, with protocols and trading venues that they are already familiar with.”
In the future, Chan said, ” we see more corporations using our data to build their own solutions, from back office solutions to front-facing products and services; and we see regulators using our data to run their own internal analyses and create reports to inform policy decisions.”
Industry-Grade Index Calculation
In order to ensure the integrity of the data, CMC has teamed up with Solactive AG, a German index provider. Based on CoinMarketCap’s raw data, Solactive will calculate the new indices with “exacting standards and strictly adhere to the stated methodology,” according to the announcement.
Solactive already administers over 3,000 market indices, including the Cboe Bitcoin Futures Index, which launched in late 2017. The firm is compliant with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks, which regulate the way securities and futures indices are calculated.
Under the terms of the agreement, Solactive will rebalance and weigh CMC indices at the end of each quarter. In order to ensure that the data remain accurate, all currencies will be ranked by market capitalization, and ineligible currencies will be removed and replaced in the accounting.
“We are very proud to be chosen as CMC’s index provider of choice in this exciting journey,” said Fabian Colin, Head of Sales at Solactive. “The ability to access CoinMarketCap data gives us the opportunity to develop custom indices for new clients.
These indices could lead to new crypto data products in the future. “Conversations have already started,” Colin added. “We are looking forward to developing more crypto indices in the future, which will optimistically result in investable indices and might lead to further products.”
These moves are likely to secure CMC’s stature as the leading provider of cryptocurrency market data. While sticklers might point out the flaws of market capitalization, it remains the preferred metric for virtual markets.
The site has also popularized the terms “circulating supply” and “bitcoin dominance” as easy yardsticks for virtual assets. Earlier this week, the company teamed up with Flipside to provide letter-grades for crypto projects.
The author is invested in Bitcoin, which is mentioned in this article.
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