Coinswitch launches India’s first rupee-based crypto index

Indian crypto investing app, Coinswitch, on Thursday launched Crypto Rupee Index (CRE8), which it claims is India’s first benchmark index to measure the performance of the rupee-based crypto market.

Owned and administered by Coinswitch, CRE8 tracks the performance of eight crypto assets that represent over 85% of the total market capitalisation of cryptos traded in the Indian Rupee. The index is based on real trades on the Coinswitch app, which has over 18 million registered users.

The index constituents are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin (BNB), Ripple (XRP), Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT) and Dogecoin (DOGE).

The CRE8 index is calculated on the weighted market capitalisation (square root) methodology.

Further, it is indicative of the total market value of all the crypto assets relative to a certain base period (1 October 2020) and base value (₹1,000).

“CRE8 is a demonstration of our commitment to bring more transparency to the Crypto market and equip users with a simple, easy-to-understand measure of the Indian market. The index provides a trustworthy, real-time view of the Indian rupee-denominated Crypto market based on actual trades, enabling Indian users to make informed investment decisions,” said Ashish Singhal, co-founder and chief executive officer, Coinswitch.

As per the platform, the index provides real time insight on the crypto market based on actual transactions on Coinswitch, and will be refreshed over 1,400 times a day to ensure reflection of real time market movement.

The index will be rebalanced monthly and reconstituted every quarter to stay up to date with the market.

Founded in 2017 as a single-window to purchase crypto from global exchanges, Coinswitch expanded to rupee-crypto trading in June 2020.

Backed by blue-chip investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Paradigm, the company is valued at $1.9 billion.

Notably, CryptoWire in March had launched India’s first crypto index, IC15, which tracks the market capitalisation and liquidity of top 15 global digital currencies in dollar terms.

The IC15 is a rule-based broad market index by market capitalization that measures the performance of 15 widely traded liquid cryptocurrencies listed on exchanges across the world, it added.