On Friday (30 November 2018), Chinese crypto mining giant Bitmain launched a new cryptocurrency index called the “Bitmain Crypto Index”.
This index, which is wholly owned by Bitmaintech Pte. Ltd, has been “developed to provide institutional and retail investors with a transparent, timely, methodology-based, and investable benchmark of the most active cryptocurrencies traded globally, denominated in USD.” The Bitmain Index Operating Committee (BIOC) will be in charge of administering the index; it will “conduct regular review and engagement with external stakeholders for feedbacks to keep the Index methodology as updated and representative as possible.”
There are two types of index prices:
- The “Real-Time Spot Price” (RTP) is published every second 24/7 365 days a year.
- The “Daily Reference Price” (DRP) is published once a day (around 02:00 UTC, or 10:00 Hong Kong time).
Also, the index lists spot prices for the 17 top cryptocurrencies (by market cap), in addition to the combined “Bitmain Big 10 Index” (BLC10) (which is based on ten large cap cryptocurrencies).
This table, from the methodology document, provides information about the main parameters of these two index prices:
At the moment, these are the main constituents of the index:
With regard to forks, Bitmain says that a “hard fork is considered if two or more diverging blockchains exist post fork that share the same pre-fork blockchain, and nodes running previous versions will no longer be compatible with the new version.”
“For the purpose of Index calculation and dissemination, a hard forked new token will be measured against a set of criteria on its 10th day post-fork to determine whether it is a “significant” one… Should a new token be deemed significant, the BIOC will start the calculation the dissemination of the Index after 15th day post-fork, otherwise the BIOC has the discretion not to publish the index on the new token pair.”
Bitmain is getting its pricing information from several crypto exchanges (including Binance, Gemini, Huobi, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Kraken, OKEx, and Poloniex).
All Images Courtesy of Bitmain
