Goldman Sachs, MSCI, and Coin Metrics Collaborate to Introduce Datonomy, a Taxonomy of Digital Assets

The new framework for digital assets classification is designed to provide investors, service providers, developers, and researchers a way to help monitor market trends, analyze portfolio risk and returns, and help build new products

Goldman Sachs, MSCI, and Coin Metrics announced the launch of datonomy, a new classification system for the digital assets market. Delivered as a new data service, datonomy classifies coins and tokens based on how they are used. Designed to provide a consistent, standardized way to help market participants view and analyze the digital assets ecosystem, datonomy will help create an increased level of transparency into how the market is moving and can be licensed for a variety of use cases, such as the review and assessment of portfolio performance and reporting.

MSCI is the owner and sole administrator of this new classification system and may receive input on potential changes from the datonomy Advisory Board (“Advisory Board”) as well as other market participants. The Advisory Board members will be comprised of Goldman Sachs, MSCI, and Coin Metrics, in addition to third-party members that can provide expertise on maintaining datonomy. Inaugural third-party members will be announced at a later date.

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The digital assets space has rapidly expanded over the last few years, with constant innovation through the creation of new protocols and applications. Digital assets participants are keen to understand this market across its wide variety of use cases, allocate capital, and manage investments. As the asset class evolves further and market volatility continues, there is an increased need for performance tracking and risk management in digital asset markets. To do this effectively, market participants need help navigating the universe of digital assets and organizing these assets into categories to better define their risk profile and understand their returns. Datonomy has been designed to fill this gap as the digital assets market matures and can serve directly as the basis for portfolio management, reporting, benchmarking, research, and analysis.

“The collaboration brings together MSCI’s expertise in critical decision support tools and services, Coin Metrics’ intelligence in the digital assets space, and Goldman Sachs’ innovative platforms paired with over 150 years of experience in financial markets to help solve this problem for clients,” remarked Anne Marie Darling, Head of Marquee Client Strategy and Distribution at Goldman Sachs. “Given our commitment to providing developer services, and as a trusted data analytics provider to our institutional clients, creating reliable data services for the emerging digital asset community is a strategic focus and natural extension to our existing business.”

This new classification system for digital assets aims to provide market participants with a consistent view of the market, allowing them to track trends across different industries, such as Smart Contract Platforms and Decentralized Finance, screen assets by a range of different filters based on their objectives, and understand aggregated properties of these assets at the portfolio level.

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“We firmly believe a consistent and standardized framework for the classification of digital assets is essential to support investors’ ability to evaluate the market,” said Stéphane Mattatia, Managing Director, Global Head of Derivatives Licensing and Thematic Indexes at MSCI. “As a co-founder of the Global Industry Classification Standard^®, we are leveraging our general experience of what’s worked in equities classification systems to offer an efficient investment tool helping clients to understand digital asset trends, identify investment opportunities, and measure the exposure of their portfolios by sector to uncover drivers of performance and risk.”

“As the leading provider of crypto financial intelligence, we are committed to bringing transparency into this ever evolving and complex market to help our clients better understand and adopt it,” said Tim Rice, CEO of Coin Metrics. “This collaboration represents a significant leap forward for the industry as a whole, establishing a coherent and future-proof structure to monitor and analyze the digital assets ecosystem.”

Datonomy can be accessed as a direct data subscription feed from Goldman Sachs, MSCI, and Coin Metrics.