Nasdaq could be helping the cryptocurrency market more than expected. On Monday, the U.S. stock market exchange announced two cryptocurrency indexes. They will be providing real-time spot or reference rate for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). These are going to be called the Bitcoin Liquid Index (BLX) and the Ethereum Liquid Index (ELX).
Nasdaq is Helping the Cryptocurrency Market
The cryptocurrency market has been in a bear trend since the beginning of 2018. This is something that affected most of the digital assets in the space. At the beginning of the current week, Bitcoin and most of the cryptocurrency market experienced an important growth. Most of the virtual currencies registered important gains and start to move far away from their multi-year lows.
These indexes will be extracting price data from several exchanges and provide onlookers single price point for both Bitcoin and Ethereum. According to Nasdaq, independent auditors verified the methodology of obtaining and unifying price data to represent the best USD value of these virtual currencies.
About it, the exchange mentioned:
“The BLX is one of the most widely-referenced BTC indices among crypto traders and has been calculated back to 2010.”
Meanwhile, the ELX price tracks data from 2014. These indices use an algorithm created by the research firm Brave New Coin. The algorithms will refresh price information every thirty seconds.
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This could be very positive in many different ways for the crypto market. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has rejected the applications of nine Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. The reason behind this decision was related to market manipulation. According to the regulator, exchanges acting as bitcoin’s reference price point remained loosely regulated.
In November 2018, Bloomberg reported that Nasdaq was planning to launch Bitcoin futures contract in 2019. According to these reports, the exchange was working with the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to solve some of the regulatory issues mentioned by these agencies.
At the moment, it is not clear whether the BLX would play a crucial role in Nasdaq futures offerings. However, it provides transparency to a market that has been attacked for the lack of transparency.
Bitcoin and most of the virtual currencies registered important gains in the last 24 hours. Bitcoin grew 2%, while Binance Coin (BNB) registered the best performance among the top 10, growing almost 12% during the same period of time.
