Bloomberg, Kaiko Launch Crypto Identifiers
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: October 15, 2021
Bloomberg and cryptocurrency data provider Kaiko have extended their financial instrument global identifiers (FIGI) issuance to crypto assets.
With the rapid growth of the cryptocurrency industry, the companies say there is a pressing need for standardisation to bring consistency, transparency, and greater efficiency to the market. Earlier this year, Kaiko took on the role of Certified Provider for Crypto FIGIs, working alongside Bloomberg.
The first batch of FIGIs for all Bitcoin and Ethereum instruments denominated in fiat currencies have now been issued via OpenFIGI and Kaiko’s Instrument Explorer and are openly accessible to the public.
FIGIs for crypto assets enable interoperability between industry participants such as digital asset exchanges, data aggregators, custodians, service providers, and regulators. The companies say that incorporating FIGIs at the infrastructure level enables a coherent view of market data across multiple providers and applications.
FIGIs will be assigned at three levels of granularity: asset, currency pair, and trading platform. Application of the FIGI hierarchy in this way will provide all market players with greater transparency and a broader view across the sector, the companies say.
The FIGI standard will also be compatible with, and complement, alternative standards. Each instrument assigned a FIGI may also be tied at the asset level to an International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) with appropriate licensing or other identifiers, such as ISO’s Digital Token Identifier (DTI).
“The lack of taxonomic, regulatory, and classification standards is one of the cryptocurrency industry’s greatest pain points today,” says Ambre Soubiran, CEO of Kaiko. “We believe that FIGIs for crypto assets will vastly improve interoperability between service providers and bring much-needed uniformity to the sector.”
Market participants throughout the traditional finance and crypto industries are expected to incorporate crypto asset FIGIs into their core infrastructure. Ian Rogers, chief experience officer of Ledger, says, “Ledger product supports more than 3000 crypto assets. Identifying those assets and fetching key data is critical for our success. Having a single unified instrument code will greatly improve our scalability and resilience and will bring high value to our users. FIGI is a much-needed initiative in the crypto industry that we are eager to support and onboard.”
Stéphane Duzan, chief operating officer of Société Générale – Forge, adds, “Consistent standards and market practices, such as the open source initiatives FIGI and CAST Framework, are an essential step towards digital assets adoption. FIGI is an important project to foster product identification of digital assets by providing to the industry unified identifiers at a global scale. It is an effective tool compatible with existing identifiers (e.g. ISIN code) and expected to be widely used by market participants.”
Meanwhile, Simon Forster, co-head of TP Icap Digital Assets, says, “The crypto asset class is in its infancy and requires structure and standardisation to further drive adoption, as such we are excited to see this initiative. Harmonising the approach to instrument identifiers is a pre-requisite for multi chain interoperability and tokenisation which TP Icap Digital Assets believe is the future for financial markets.”