Wilshire adds CrossTower, Okcoin, and eToroX for price discovery, eyes CEX.io and FTX
Wilshire’s settlement pricing methodology mitigates risks associated with sourcing prices from one exchange and counters possible price swings or manipulation at settlement time.
Wilshire has promoted CrossTower, Okcoin, and eToroX from ‘watchlist’ to ‘contributing’ exchanges that help facilitate price discovery through the FT Wilshire Digital Asset Index Series, which now features 38 blended price, multi-coin indexes.
The firm requires robust standards for institutional quality digital asset indexes and the addition of these three contributing exchanges brings the total number of venues to 10: Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Coinbase, CrossTower, eToroX, Gemini, itBit, Kraken, LMAX Digital, and Okcoin.
In addition to CrossTower, Okcoin, and eToroX, which moved to “contributing”, Wilshire added CEX.io and FTX to the watchlist in order to determine if they meet all the eligibility criteria to be promoted to a contributing exchange at the next semi-annual review.
Wilshire launches 25 crypto indexes, available via Refinitiv
The blended price methodology is to calculate real-time, hourly, and end-of-day settlement prices for 38 tradable digital asset indexes, a significant expansion from the initial 13 indexes launched in September 2021 as an additional 22 new blended price single-asset and three thematic indexes were launched by Wilshire this week.
All indexes are available via Refinitiv and ready for institutional investors and asset managers to license for digital asset portfolio construction, performance attribution, and as the basis for index-linked products like ETPs, futures, and tracker funds.
Martin Howard, SVP of Index Research at Wilshire, said: “The Wilshire index team has meticulously designed, tested, and published a new pedigree of digital asset indexes that are investible, representative, and in-line with the highest standards of compliance investors expect. Wilshire’s 32 blended prices are a robust and tradable spot price which ensures investment products can rely on a single source of pricing data derived from multiple high-quality exchanges.”
“Our blended pricing is a necessary building block for establishing a formal settlement price in a market where assets are trading on multiple exchanges 24/7. Wilshire’s settlement pricing methodology mitigates risks associated with sourcing prices from one exchange and counters possible price swings or manipulation at settlement time”, he continued.
“We’re also excited to introduce the first three thematic indexes which are based on the Digital Asset Taxonomy System definitions for DeFi, Smart Contracts and Environmentally Focused digital assets. These indexes contain the largest 10 eligible digital assets within each theme, allowing investors to provide highly focused and liquid digital index-linked products”.
Charles Hayter, CEO and Co-Founder of CryptoCompare, commented, “Through our partnership with Wilshire, investors can trust that the underlying data powering its digital asset indexes is reliable, compliant, and transparently sourced. CryptoCompare adheres to the most rigorous standards to guarantee the integrity of its digital asset data, referencing trusted trading venues to ensure consistency and confidence in the market. Using our proprietary Exchange Benchmark methodology, we only take in prices from the lowest risk exchanges which we have identified as having strong anti-money laundering and know-your-customer (AML/KYC) risk controls.”
