Wilshire announces Blythe Masters as Chair of new Digital Assets Advisory Group

By Edlyn Cardoza

Wilshire, a global investment technology and advisory company, recently announced the formation of the Wilshire Digital Asset Advisory Group (Advisory Group) with Blythe Masters, Founding Partner at Motive Partners and an expert in financial services, technology, and digital assets, as Chair. The Advisory Group brings together the top digital asset practitioners in the world to capture their collective perspectives and insights. A crucial next step is to deliver an industry standard Digital Assets Taxonomy System (DATS).

As of October 2021, there are over 7,000 active digital assets in existence, moving far beyond cryptocurrencies. Working with Digital Asset Research (DAR), a specialist provider of crypto data and research, the Advisory Group has developed a comprehensive methodology for the classification of digital assets. DATS allows the industry to categorize, manage and research digital asset technologies by identifying common usage types and underlying technologies, as well as investment themes. This is an important building block for the institutional market to develop investment solutions based on rigorous research.

Mark Makepeace, Chief Executive of Wilshire, commented “I’m thrilled to announce Blythe Masters as the Chair of the Wilshire Digital Assets Advisory Group. It’s incredibly important to bring together the leaders in this market to ensure institutional participants have the depth of independent research available to bring the right solutions to market for investors. By developing a standardized taxonomy with DAR that is aligned to the way investors already compare industry and sector trends, we continue to be a catalyst in bringing safer access to the digital assets market for institutional investors.”

Blythe Masters, Chair of the Wilshire Digital Assets Advisory Committee, said: “The world of digital assets continues to develop at pace and is growing in importance, meaning it is absolutely the right time to develop a classification taxonomy to help investors make sense of it all. With Wilshire and DAR, we have the right partners involved, bringing the right experience and insights to the creation of a taxonomy, from which investors will see real benefits.”

Doug Schwenk, CEO of DAR, said “Since 2017, we have been committed to providing unbiased institutional quality crypto data and research to investors. We are incredibly proud to be working with Wilshire and Blythe as this Advisory Group sets standards for the institutional market. By contributing our existing DAR Taxonomy as a starting point, we’re hitting the ground running with a solution backed by 5 years of work, covering 1,000+ assets, and used by numerous market participants.”

Having a taxonomy of digital assets has become an increasingly important market requirement due to the exponential growth of new crypto assets including non-fungible tokens (NFTs). From industry to subsector, DATS will be based on a digital asset’s functionality or use case. DATS will be available in January 2022.