CoinMarketCap produces new indices to track digital currencies

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CoinMarketCap has been in the news quite a bit over the last few days, and that continued on Wednesday when the company announced that they would be launching two new cryptocurrency benchmark indices. These will be visible on their own platform, as well as on NASDAQ, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and Germany’s Börse Stuttgart.

According to the release, CoinMarketCap will be providing the “most comprehensive” crypto data offerings that are available on the market today. This will include a listing of the top 200 cryptocurrencies, as categorized by market capitalization. Of the two indices, one will include Bitcoin Core (BTC) while the other will not.

The first index will be referred to as the CMC Crypto 200 Index (CMC200) and will include BTC information. This will give it the ability to cover as much as 90% of the total cryptocurrency market across the globe according to the release.

The second index, referred to as the CMC Crypto 200 ex BTC Index (CMC200EX), will track how well cryptocurrencies are doing in the market without being influenced by BTC. While BTC controls over 50% of the total market capitalization, other forms of digital currency are looking to get themselves out from underneath the shadow of BTC. This will give investors and financial institutions the ability to rate other currencies’ performances without bitcoin looming over the performance of other currencies.

It has been a busy last few days at CoinMarketCap. On Monday, the company announced that their crypto assets would now feature a flipside letter grade. This metric would evaluate several different factors in determining the asset score (FCAS). This was big news considering that CoinMarketCap should soon be offering this as part of their Android application, scheduled for release in early April.

Currently, most market aggregators rank cryptocurrencies according to their market cap. This is determined by measuring the total price of the currency in relation to its entire supply. However, this can be easily manipulated and is one of the reasons why the FCAS measurement is seen as a big advancement. This metric will measure the activity of users and developers, giving a more accurate determination of the value of a particular currency.

CoinMarketCap worked in conjunction with Flipside Crypto to produce the metric. In a statement provided by Flipside, they explained that “Once we clean, analyze, and recreate the raw data elements, we combine them with market data gathered from various sources to inform our models.”

While the new indices should help to revolutionize the way that cryptocurrencies are evaluated, the company is not done. They are expected to try to produce new crypto indices in the future.