The cryptocurrency media and events platform CoinDesk, which owns this news service, announced on Tuesday that it had purchased TradeBlock, the world’s leading cryptographic index provider.
With the purchase, CoinDesk said it is positioned to be the main source of news, information and cryptographic data for the rapidly growing sector, which has seen a spate of interest and investment from financial companies. In the year that just ended, the price of bitcoin, the main cryptocurrency, rose more than 300%, driven largely by institutional investors.
“We will be the preferred destination for cryptographic investors for unified media, events, research, pricing and data,” said Kevin Worth, CEO of CoinDesk, in a statement.
The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The entire TradeBlock team will remain with the company, which will operate independently from media operations to maintain TradeBlock’s commitment to data security and confidentiality and the integrity of CoinDesk’s journalism, the media company said.
More than $ 20 billion in investment products use TradeBlock indices and billions of dollars in monthly trading volume are quoted against them, said CoinDesk. The largest user of TradeBlock’s XBX index is the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the largest publicly traded crypto financial product, the media company said. The gray scale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of CoinDesk. Previously, DCG held a minority stake in TradeBlock.
Michael Casey, director of content for CoinDesk, wrote in a blog on Medium that the business fits into a long tradition of news organizations that act as custodians and curators of crucial financial indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Financial Times’ FTSE 100 and Nikkei’s Nikkei 225.
“These channels are ideally placed to promote confidence in the integrity of the numbers,” wrote Casey. “Wall Street is coming. It will demand reliable prices. “