German startup Bita wants to become “the S&P of crypto indices”

Bita, a German crypto index company, tries to bring transparency and credibility to the Wild West of digital assets trading. The company has published what it calls “the first line of fully independent indices and benchmarks” for cryptocurrencies and digital tokens.

Víctor Hugo Gómez, the managing director of Bita, said in an interview with Altfi that his company wants to enable professional trading within the crypto sphere.

“We noticed that a lot of people were investing very early on setting up exchanges, hedge funds or trading platforms. But very people few have been paying attention to the structure around it. And we know that digital assets will become an important asset class for institutional portfolios sooner or later.

Bita’s aim is to become the “the S&P of crypto” –  the global leader in the emerging business of digital asset indices and data. Bita’s initial offering includes BITA50, which the company wants to make into the benchmark index for the cryptocurrencies akin to what S&P 500 index is to the US stock market.

Bita also released four other indices, which are designed diversification and liquidity in mind. These indices can work as a basis for passive investment products.

As the cryptocurrency sector is maturing, hedge funds and other institutional investors are becoming more involved. They have a growing need for reliable and unbiased data.

Bita was set up eight months ago by an experienced group of capital markets and fintech experts. Gómez is a serial entrepreneur and a former senior vice president of the ventures arm for the Deutsche Börse Group. Bita’s executive group also includes Christoph Brück who founded Naga, a fintech company which recently had a successful IPO on Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Gómez said that Bita’s business model is based on data integrity and their own pricing model.

“Right now much of the data out there is very insufficient. Our competitors are taking the data straight from the exchanges and not cleaning it. This can lead to situations of market manipulation and other inefficiencies in the market.”

Bita aims to clean the data of invalid trades and excludes data from those exchanges that have issues with their data accuracy. Bita's index calculation platform obtains prices in real time to make sure the information is up-to-date. The pricing methods will be public.

The end game is that institutional investors launch financial products based on Bita’s indices. According to Gómez, this is already happening.

“We have our first institutional client that is going to launch few of their index funds based on our indices. We will announce details about this with our partner in a couple of weeks at Blockshow Europe.”