Wall Street has a new crypto benchmark, and Bitcoin is not in it. S&P Dow Jones Indices, the firm behind the S&P 500, built the 18-token index with crypto fund Pantera Capital.

The S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index went live on Monday, July 20, under the ticker SPPDA. It only accepts tokens that earn real revenue for their holders.

One Simple Test, Modeled on the S&P 500

To join the S&P 500, a company needs four straight quarters of profit. The new index copies that idea. A token gets in only if its protocol earns revenue, quarter after quarter.

Analytics firm Artemis checks that revenue on the blockchain. The money must also flow back to holders. That can happen through buybacks, staking rewards, or payouts.

The filter is brutal. S&P’s broad crypto index holds 196 tokens. Only 18 passed the revenue test. Together, they earned over $3 billion in annualized revenue across the last two quarters, per Pantera’s launch letter.

Ether (ETH), BNB, Solana (SOL), TRON (TRX), and Hyperliquid (HYPE) carry the biggest weights. No single token can exceed 35% of the index.

The approach seems to work, at least on paper. Test runs from June 2021 through June 2026 returned 8.18% a year, per the official brochure. The 196-token index returned just 0.08%. However, S&P warns those results were simulated with hindsight.

“S&P Dow Jones Indices helps investors cut through market noise with benchmarks you can trust. With the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index, we bring that same discipline to digital assets, using a fundamentals-driven, economics-based framework built for diversified portfolios,” S&P Dow Jones Indices CEO Cathy Clay explained the goal in a statement.

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Why the New Crypto Benchmark Skips Bitcoin

Bitcoin earns no protocol revenue, so it fails the test. Pantera calls it a monetary asset, more like digital gold than a business. Investors who want it can simply buy it directly, as returning Bitcoin ETF inflows show.

The index chases a bigger prize. Pantera, citing JPMorgan Private Bank research, says 89% of family offices still hold no crypto at all. The firm blames products that mix meme coins with real businesses.

As BeInCrypto reported, the benchmark snubs Bitcoin over revenue, not size. Hyperliquid tells the opposite story. Its spot Hyperliquid ETFs only began trading in May. Now it sits in the top five.

S&P has been moving this way for months. It launched its first hybrid crypto-equity benchmark last October.

Pantera is already talking to asset managers about ETFs built on the index. The stakes are large. Around $13 trillion tracks the S&P 500. If even a small slice moves this way, the index will punch far above its size.

Source: BeInCrypto