Intelligence Unit (IU), a provider of crypto-asset investment solutions, announced on Wednesday its partnership with Nomura Research Institute (NRI) to launch a digital asset index - NRI/IU Crypto-Asset Index - in Japan.
Claiming to be the country’s first, the companies also tied with MV Index Solutions and CryptoCompare for utilizing their market and price tracking technologies.
Per the announcement, the new investment instrument will be available through NRI’s financial information database to both domestic and international institutional clients. The offerings will initiate on January 31.
Commenting on the index, Akihiro Niimi, CEO of Intelligence Unit, said: “Strong demand from institutional investors is contributing to the growth of crypto-asset funds, and well-diversified products like index funds are attractive as alternative investments. We will Bridge the traditional financial world and the crypto-asset world by providing institutional grade crypto-asset benchmarks, further establishing the status of crypto-assets as alternative investment.”
Growing institutional demand for crypto investments
The index will track the prices of five digital assets - Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and XRP - and will be available to trade in two fiats - USD and JPY.
The announcement also pointed out that the index can be used by institutional investors as a benchmark for objective investment appraisal. Further, it will allow crypto exchanges and financial information providers to display charts and index values to investors to be used as objective criteria to evaluate their investments.
“We are pleased to launch this index for Intelligence Unit and the Nomura Research Institute,” said Thomas Kettner, managing director at MVIS. “We are happy to offer our services and deep expertise in digital assets indexing to the Japanese market.”
With growing institutional demand for digital asset investments, many index funds are popping up in the market. Yesterday, Finance Magnates reported the launch of another Bitcoin index fund by Stack, which is claiming to be the first crypto index fund in Asia.
