Nasdaq launched Brave New Coin’s Bitcoin and Ethereum Liquid Indexes (BLX and ELX) on its platform which hosts 40,000 global indices.

A week after the first major crypto announcement of 2019, Nasdaq today started its listing of Brave New Coin’s BLX and ELX liquid indices for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Investors have been waiting for just this type of institutional endorsement as Nasdaq has plans to launch a bitcoin futures market alongside Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE) Bakkt futures market which was due to launch on its platform on January 23. This launch has now been pushed back to Q2 2019.

Brave New Coin wrote on their website:

“BNC’s ‘Liquid Index’ (LX) indices are part qualitative and part quantitative, factoring in the stability and quality of constituency as well as the volume, book depth, tick size and other factors from the qualified market participants, to calculate a fair global value for the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum, expressed in USD, every 30 seconds. The methodology adds to the transparency of pricing crypto assets, a concern that has prevented regulators in approving retail products.”

Institutional investors now have a custody and liquid indicies framework

Fran Strajnar, CEO of BNC said:

“The LX 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.”

Strajnar continued:

“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.”

Strajnar added:

“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”

“We are in talks with a range of market participants and hope to be able to share further developments on this front very soon”.