API Case Studies

Bletchley Indexes is fast becoming the go-to platform for asset managers, investors, and traders to find accurate benchmarks on the financial performance of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. Their multiple indexes help to narrow the gap between the crypto community and professional investors by providing independent, up-to-date, high-quality market information which minimizes the execution costs of tracking funds.

Powered by Nomics’ Cryptocurrency Market Data API, Bletchley Indexes is unique in its straightforward and unbiased methodology. We talk to Mike, Bletchley’s Co-founder, to find out how he is leading the fight against ill-defined global metrics in the crypto space.

What was your background before starting the Bletchley Indexes?

I work at a trading firm in Chicago and have spent the majority of my career on options market making desks for fixed income products. My co-founder and CTO, Steve, works at an exchange in Chicago as a software engineer.

What’s the Bletchley origin story?

In early 2017, as more coins became relevant, I found myself continually wishing that I could simply look at an index instead of scrolling through CoinMarketCap.com to figure out how the market was moving.

I had also read about the first go around of altcoins from 2013 and the corresponding data analysis around returns of coins other than Bitcoin. There was a lot of conjecture and no robust data to precisely track how simple strategies performed. I wanted to make sure that the industry wouldn’t have that problem again.

From my day job, I was extremely familiar with best practices in the traditional financial industry around index construction, methodologies, and rebalancing. I thought there was a valuable tool the community was missing; I had the expertise to provide it, and I wanted to do my part to contribute to the growth of the industry. Subsequently, I reached out to my co-founder, and we began working in March of 2017.

What do the Bletchley Indexes do and what problems do they solve?

We provide benchmarks for the financial performance of digital assets. Our eight unique indexes with USD and BTC denominated pricing are tools to help decipher the story of market dynamics. Instead of looking at the individual returns of tens or hundreds of assets, differences in one or two indexes are often sufficient to explain what is driving the market. Referring to indexes instead of ill-defined global metrics also provides a more accurate picture of replicable returns.

Bletchley provides light standard analysis around our indexes and the market, along with APIs to connect with data providers and investors. We also publish data allowing for easy replication of all of our indexes.

When it comes to crypto market data APIs, what problems did you need to solve?

Our biggest concern is around reliable pricing, both in terms of API feed stability as well as the quality of the price calculation to prevent unwarranted extreme values. The secondary consideration is the quality of historical data which assists in assessing performance against other market strategies and provides index metrics to our users.

What were you using before Nomics?

For the last year, we used CryptoCompare. [Read more…] about Case Study: Why Bletchley Indexes Switched to The Nomics API to Power Their Cryptoasset Indexes