Bloomberg, Reuters gear up for new cryptocurrency social media index

Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters trading terminals are preparing to offer access to a new cryptocurrency index based on social media and news commentary, in a move aimed at providing more information for those trading crypto through their platforms.

In a statement, index provider Cryptoindex said people using the terminal would be able to access data on the top 100 cryptocurrencies, ranked according to volume reliability. The rankings are rebalanced on a monthly basis, allowing Cryptoindex to identify and eliminate the scope for abuse through inflated transaction volumes.

An increasing problem in the cryptocurrency sector, Cryptoindex said traders could trust its top 200 rankings as cryptocurrencies that are both “almost always traded on multiple exchanges” and have a “significant social media following.”

Aside from Bloomberg and Reuters, trading social network TradingView will also carry the data feed, providing users with access to the index as an additional metric for assessing cryptocurrency investments.

Cryptoindex CEO VJ Angelo said the index provides an important additional insight for assessing sentiment in cryptocurrency markets.

“The index is the culmination of three decades experience in the financial services industry building indices. I have witnessed first hand the growing demand for high-quality insight into the traditionally opaque and misunderstood area of cryptocurrency, which led me to create Cryptoindex. Our index takes into account collective sentiments expressed on social media, in addition to complex data analysis of volume trades and predictive analytics,” he explained.

Cryptoindex compiles source information on as many as 1,800 cryptocurrencies, before filtering the results to deliver the definitive rankings. Data is drawn from a combination of cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as from social media platforms including Twitter, GitHub and Telegram.

A Cryptoindex representative told CoinDesk that they analyzed “over 33 terabytes of data,” from which they extracted some 200 factors to “create a refined ranking in the index, which is then put into a neural network to create a final rating of coins.”

According to Cryptoindex, the new product was suited to the needs of professional and institutional investors in crypto, noting, “[The product allows] a methodology fully suited to the needs and requirements of heavily regulated asset managers, institutional and professional investors.”