Wilshire Creates Digital Assets Advisory Group, Names Blythe Masters Chair

Global investment technology and advisory leader Wilshire has announced the creation of a new digital asset group led by a heavy hitter in the financial services industry.

What Happened? Wilshire has created the Wilshire Digital Asset Advisory Group and named Blythe Masters, founding partner at Motive Partners, as chair.

Why It’s Important: Wilshire provides indexes, advanced analytics and multi-asset investment solutions to a client base of more than 500 institutional investors and financial intermediaries. The firm advises on more than $1.3 trillion in assets, including $93 billion in assets under management.

The goal of the new group is to create a standard transparent digital asset taxonomy system (DATS) to categorize the top 1,000 digital asset technologies by market capitalization.

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As of late October, there are more than 7,000 active digital assets, but the space can be very disorganized and confusing for investors. Wilshire is working with cryptocurrency data and research firm Digital Asset Research (DAR) to generate a comprehensive classification methodology for digital assets that will allow these technologies to be categorized and classified by variables such as underlying technology and investment themes.

Digital assets will first be categorized into one of three main supersectors, including digital currencies, computational platforms and financial instruments. Digital assets will also be grouped into themes and shared characteristics, such as Environmentally Focused and Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

Digital Asset Advisory Group plans to review DATS classification decisions and publicly communicate any changes to the system on a quarterly basis.

“The world of digital assets continues to develop at pace and is growing in importance, meaning it is absolutely the right time to develop a classification taxonomy to help investors make sense of it all,” Masters said in a press release.

Benzinga’s Take: There is a lot of market excitement surrounding cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other digital assets, but the nascent digital asset market is currently very disorganized and confusing to novice investors. Wilshire is seemingly looking to create some much-needed digital asset organization for its clients with its new Digital Asset Advisory Group.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay