Amid increasing interest in the cryptocurrency markets, Bloomberg, the global leader among market data providers and index services, has launched the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index (BGCI), which is “designed to track the performance of the largest, most liquid portion of the cryptocurrency market.”

Market-Cap Weighted: The First Major Crypto Index

The BGCI is a market cap-weighted index, which implies that cryptocurrencies with higher market cap will have a higher weight in the index. BGCI will consist of up to a maximum of 12 cryptocurrencies that are traded in U.S. dollars. At the launch, it has 10 cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ethereum, monero, ripple and ZCash. The index constituents cover various facets of cryptocurrencies that include mediums of storage of monetary value and mediums of value exchange (for instance, bitcoin), smart contract protocols (ethereum), and privacy-focused digital assets (monero). (See also: The Five Most Private Cryptocurrencies.)

It will be rebalanced and reconstituted monthly, and each constituent​​​ weight will be between the range of maximum 30% and minimum 1%. If any cryptocurrency undergoes a hard fork leading to the birth of a new cryptocurrency, the above mentioned rules will apply for each new qualifying entry in the index to both the parent and child (forked-out) cryptocurrency.

The index starts with a base value of 1,000 as of start date of May 3, 2018. At the time of launch, the index had the following 10 constituents: