The Exchange Has Built a Crypto Index That Deliberately Leaves Out Bitcoin and Ether
CME and CF Benchmarks switched on two indices on Monday. One is a broad market benchmark built around bitcoin and ether. The other excludes both of them and tracks ten other assets, which is a statement about what the rest of the market is for.
Tuesday, September 1, 2026/3 min read
CME Group and CF Benchmarks brought two indices live on Monday, shortly after ten in the morning London time. The first is unremarkable and the second is not.
The CME CF Crypto Market Index is a broad benchmark weighted by free float market capitalisation, with bitcoin and ether at its centre, which is what a crypto market index has always meant. The CME CF Emerging Crypto Index excludes bitcoin and ether entirely and tracks ten assets: BNB, XRP, SOL, HYPE, LINK, Lumens, SUI, UNI, AVAX and AAVE.
Why leaving the two largest assets out is the interesting decision
Because an index is not a measurement. It is a definition.
Bitcoin and ether are so large that in any capitalisation weighted basket they drown out everything else, and a broad index ends up being a bitcoin tracker wearing a wider name. Anyone trying to answer the question of how the rest of the market performed has never had a clean instrument to ask it with.
Removing them creates that instrument, and in doing so creates a category. Ten assets that previously shared only the word altcoin now have a defined membership, a published weighting and a daily settlement price. That is how an asset class gets built, and it is done by index providers rather than by the projects themselves.
The mechanics, which matter more than they sound
Real time values update roughly once a second. Settlement variants are calculated once a day and published at four in the afternoon in London, New York and Singapore or Hong Kong.
Three settlement prints in three time zones is the detail that gives this away as infrastructure rather than a dashboard. A single daily fix is what a structured product needs to price against, and publishing one per region is what lets a fund in Asia and a fund in Europe reference the same index without arguing about which minute counts.
The indices went into a trial release from 24 August, giving data vendors and trading desks a week to wire up the feed before it went live. That is a plumbing timetable, not a marketing one.
What they explicitly do not do
They do not settle futures or options.
CME was careful about this, and the distinction separates the new indices from the exchange's existing single asset reference rates, which underpin real derivatives contracts. These two are measurement tools: performance benchmarks, risk management inputs, and, in the language of the launch, potential future benchmarks for structured products.
Potential is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is the point. An index with a published methodology, a daily fix and an exchange's name on it is the precondition for a fund. Nobody launches a product tracking a basket that nobody has agreed how to measure. This is the step before.
Read alongside what the funds are already doing
The Hashdex Nasdaq CME Crypto Index ETF ran its scheduled reconstitution on Tuesday and added HYPE at an initial weight of 3.36 per cent.
That is the same machinery in operation: an index rule fires, a fund follows it, and an asset acquires a class of buyer who never formed a view about it. The buyer bought the basket.
This is how equities have worked for decades and it is arriving here in compressed form. We wrote about the first stage of it in the approval of spot bitcoin funds and about what happens when the wrapper stops being single asset in the multi token era.
The thing to be sceptical about
Index inclusion is a judgement dressed as arithmetic.
Somebody decided which ten assets qualify as emerging rather than failed, and that decision now carries money behind it. The methodology will be published and defensible, and it will still be a set of thresholds chosen by people, applied to a market where liquidity is concentrated in a handful of venues and where the difference between a real free float and a nominal one is not always visible.
None of that makes the index wrong. It means that when an asset is added or dropped, the news is the committee, not the market. Watch the reconstitutions.
Meanwhile the prices themselves went the other way this week. Bitcoin opened Tuesday around 78,500 dollars and drifted lower, with expectations of a rate rise later this month weighing on the whole complex. Infrastructure gets built on quiet weeks, which is usually when it is worth paying attention to.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
Newsletter
The Digest, in your inbox
One edition, sent when it is ready. No noise, and your address is never passed on.
Read Next
More Crypto →
An Attacker Minted Forty Nine Billion Dollars of SAND and Left With Six Hundred and Seventy Five Thousand
Aug 30, 2026/4 min read
You Can Buy a House Without Selling Your Bitcoin Now, and the Collateral Terms Tell You What It Is Really Worth
Aug 28, 2026/4 min read
Bitcoin Is Having Its Best August Since 2017. It Is Also Still a Third Below Its Record.
Aug 25, 2026/3 min read
The SEC Has Asked 27 Questions About the Next Generation of Crypto Funds, and You Have Until 31 August to Answer
Aug 24, 2026/4 min read