Winklevoss brothers launch new Bitcoin price index called Winkdex as their Bitcoin Trust moves closer to regulatory approval
Winklevoss Brothers Offer an Index to Track Price of Bitcoin — Stock traders have the Standard & Poor's 500. Bitcoin bettors will have the Winkdex.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Winklevoss twins have been building toward this since they announced a Bitcoin fund in July 2013: first the vehicle, now the measurement stick. With the Winkdex, they are positioning themselves as the reference price for bitcoin the way the S&P 500 anchors equities — and the index lands just as their Bitcoin Trust edges closer to regulatory approval, meaning the number that values the trust would be one they publish themselves.
The pickup was broad for a single-day story — DealBook, Gigaom, and tech journalists including Kashmir Hill and Jason Del Rey all carried it, with the twins amplifying it directly — reflecting how closely the market was watching anyone attempting to wrap bitcoin in conventional securities infrastructure.
First-order effects
- The Winklevoss brothers gain control of the benchmark itself: if regulators approve the Bitcoin Trust, the net asset value of shares held by retail investors will be calculated off an index the sponsors publish, aligning the twins' data business with their fund business.
- Bitcoin traders immediately get a consolidated price reference modeled on equity indices, replacing reliance on any single exchange's ticker as the de facto spot price.
Second-order effects
- Rival exchanges and index compilers face pressure to have their prices counted in the Winkdex methodology or risk becoming invisible to institutional money routed through the trust.
- If the trust wins approval with a sponsor-owned benchmark attached, other prospective bitcoin fund sponsors must either license the Winkdex, build competing indices, or explain to regulators why their pricing source is more credible.
Third-order effects
- Owning the reference price ahead of owning the approved vehicle is a template for financializing an unregulated asset: whoever controls the benchmark controls which exchange volumes matter, and the SEC's decision on the trust effectively ratifies one private index as the market standard.
- A pattern where each regulatory milestone forces another layer of conventional market plumbing — indices, then custodians, then listed funds — suggests bitcoin's path into mainstream portfolios runs through sponsor-built infrastructure rather than existing exchanges adopting it natively.
The trend: Bitcoin is being pulled into conventional market structure bottom-up, with entrepreneurs building the benchmark, fund, and custody layers themselves while waiting on regulators to approve each piece.