Wilshire adds CrossTower, Okcoin and eToroX to its Digital Asset Blended Price Methodology

By Edlyn Cardoza

Wilshire, a global investment technology and advisory company, recently announced that CrossTower, Okcoin, and eToroX have been promoted from ‘watchlist’ to ‘contributing’ exchanges. Contributing exchanges help facilitate price discovery through the FT Wilshire Digital Asset Index Series, which now features 38 blended price, multi-coin indexes.

This increases the number of contributing exchanges which meet Wilshire’s robust standards for institutional quality digital asset indexes from 7 to 10 – Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Coinbase, CrossTower, eToroX, Gemini, itBit, Kraken, LMAX Digital, and Okcoin.

Two exchanges have been added to the watchlist, CEX.io and FTX, to be monitored to determine if they meet all the eligibility criteria to be promoted to a contributing exchange at the following semi-annual review.

Wilshire’s blended price methodology calculates real-time, hourly, and end-of-day settlement prices for 38 tradable digital asset indexes. An additional 22 new blended price single-asset and three thematic indexes were launched by Wilshire today, expanding on the initial 13 indexes launched in September 2021.

The blended price and thematic indexes are classified in accordance with the Digital Asset Taxonomy System (DATS), which was launched earlier in 2022. DATS was developed for investors to research, analyse and construct digital asset portfolios.

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.”

Wilshire uses the CryptoCompare Exchange Benchmark as the basis for the semi-annual Wilshire Exchange Review. The Exchange Benchmark rates over 150 digital asset exchanges against eight criteria.

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.”

Howard adds, “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”.

The FT Wilshire Digital Asset Indexes are displayed on the FT Digital Asset Dashboard, an easy-to-use and freely available data platform for pricing and insight into the digital assets market. The dashboard gives readers institutional-quality information to explore and dissect digital asset data, identify global trends and compare the value change of digital asset indexes.