S&P Crypto Index has 243 coins. DOGE is not one of them

The index company's Broad Digital Market tracker dives deep – very deep – into the digital asset universe, CoinDesk found.

Dogecoin is out; bitcoin diamond is in. So go the rules of the S&P’s new benchmark for the crypto sector.

CoinDesk obtained a list of the 243 digital assets in the S&P Cryptocurrency Broad Digital Market (BDM) Index. A cursory analysis found that Wall Street’s latest attempt to measure returns from the “broad investable universe” ventured to crypto’s outermost rings. 

An eclectic mix of name-brand blockchains and lesser-known protocols are included in S&P’s BDM. Weighted according to the index-maker’s rulebook, the coins’ collective returns crunch down to a point-based performance figure. That figure hovered around 2,676 at press time, down 14% for the month of July.

For comparison, S&P’s bitcoin tracker showed it down 450.86 points, or 11.5%, in the same time period.

BDM certainly featured bitcoin and its end-of-June market cap of over $650 billion. But the index, whose average market cap was $4.8 billion according to S&P, largely consisted of small- and mid-cap cryptos whose stories are unknown to the average banker.

One such token is skycoin, a $15 million small-cap with about $387,000 in trading volume. CoinGecko ranked it in the 660 neighborhood by valuation. In November 2018, now-deceased crypto iconoclast John McAfee had the coin’s logo tattooed on his back. 

That might be a result of S&P’s inclusion policies. The committee overseeing BDM can nix a coin that “may be an unregistered security,” that has “privacy features” or that faces “potential market disruption,” according to governance documents.

But dogecoin, the bitcoin spin-off that best encapsulated the zany boom times of memecoin season, is nowhere on the list.

“It’s because they don’t have a white paper,” a source familiar with the selection process told CoinDesk.

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