Kaiko, a cryptocurrency market data provider, is bringing Bloomberg’s Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) into play as a means of identifying crypto assets and enabling greater interoperability between industry participants including digital asset exchanges, data aggregators, custodians, service providers and regulators. The companies’ first move is the release of a batch of FIGIs for all Bitcoin and Ethereum instruments denominated in fiat currencies.
As well as being a step up for the FIGI, the use of the identifier for crypto assets is an early push towards meeting the need for standardisation across digital asset markets to ensure consistency, transparency and greater efficiency.
The FIGI was designated an open standard by the Object Management Group (OMG) back in 2015 and acts as a unique identifier of financial instruments including equities, derivatives, bonds, municipals, and currencies. In September 2021, the FIGI was accredited as a US national standard by the Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. Earlier this year, Kaiko was approved by OMG as a certified provider of Crypto FIGIs working alongside Bloomberg as the registration authority for the identifiers.
FIGIs will be assigned at three levels of granularity – asset, currency pair, and trading platform – to provide market participants with greater transparency and a broader view across the sector. The FIGI standard will be compatible with and complement alternative standards. For example, 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 the ISO’s planned Digital Token Identifier (DTI).
Ambre Soubiran, CEO at Kaiko, says: “The lack of taxonomy, regulatory, and classification standards is one of the cryptocurrency industry’s greatest pain points today. FIGIs for crypto assets will vastly improve interoperability between service providers and bring much-needed uniformity to the sector.”
Endorsing the use of FIGIs as crypto identifiers, Ian Rogers, chief experience officer at Ledger, provider of a crypto hardware wallet, says: “Ledger products support more than 3,000 crypto assets. The ability to identify these assets and fetch key data is critical to our success A single unified instrument code will not only greatly improve our scalability and resilience, but also bring high value to our users. FIGI is a much needed initiative in the crypto industry.”
Stéphane Duzan, chief operating officer of Société Générale – Forge, comments: “Consistent standards and market practices, such as the open source initiatives FIGI and CAST Framework, are essential to achieving digital assets adoption. FIGI fosters product identification of digital assets by providing the industry with unified identifiers at a global scale.”
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