Nasdaq, the US-based multinational financial services corporation that owns and operates the NASDAQ stock market and eight European stock exchanges, has listed BTC and ETH indices on its platform starting Monday, February 25.
The listings were launched with real-time price data, refreshed every 30 seconds, provided by the Bitcoin Liquid Index (BLX) and the Ethereum Liquid Index (ELX), which aggregate real-time information based on the most liquid ends of their markets.
Both BLX and ELX indices were created by market data company Brave New Coin, a data and research company focused on the blockchain and cryptographic assets industry.founded in 2014.
Focused on the development of a marketplace for incumbent and third-party applications, news-feeds, research and market data products unlocked through the BNC token utility, the company’s products have been chosen by some of the world’s leading firms within the capital markets industry, including TP ICAP, Thomson Reuters, Trade Smith, Barchart, and Amazon Alexa.
Its XchangeFeed service provides access to near real-time streaming of price and volume data from over 240 exchanges. Nasdaq decided to use the BLX and ELX indices to help “traders get in and out of a given position”. “The BLX is one of the most widely-referenced BTC indices among crypto traders and has been calculated back to 2010. Likewise, the ELX has been calculated back to 2014″, said Nasdaq in a recent statement.
The two new indices have joined Nasdaq’s Global Index Data Service, the firm’s premier real-time data feed that consolidates all Nasdaq indexes and ETF valuation data as well as third-party partner data. Through that feed, BLX and ELX have become part of several Nasdaq’s indices, including Nasdaq Composite.
Fran Straijnar, Chief Executive Officer at Brave New Coin, commented: “The LX [Liquid Index] program was born out of a need for clear and transparent price discovery of liquid cryptographic assets and is a bigger need today then it was back in 2015 when we started this program. BNC endorses the IOSCO principles and fully embraces the IOSCO’s goals of addressing the obvious conflicts of interest in the benchmark-setting process, which the nascent crypto industry is vulnerable to.”
“The crypto derivative wave is inevitable. Once custody was solved, first with Fidelity’s announcements last November, and now with indices that align with IOSCO principles being available through the Nasdaq, there’s going to be a rush to produce all manner of financial instruments, which the institutional users have been asking for, for almost 3 years now”, Straijnar added.
Nasdaq’s partnership with Brave New Coin comes ahead of the launch of a index tracking the price of Ripple (XRP).
