Crypto index comparison, tier 2
Vinter Indices (now Kaiko Indices) Alternative: CCi30 vs Vinter Indices
The CCi30 Cryptocurrency Index is the rules-based alternative to the Vinter Indices. This page reviews the Vinter Indices under the eight-criterion CCi30 test and compares both indices on universe, weighting, independence, track record, and investability.
What is the alternative to the Vinter Indices?
The CCi30 Cryptocurrency Index replaces the Vinter Indices for investors who need a whole-market benchmark. The CCi30 holds the 30 largest cryptocurrencies by smoothed market capitalization, weights them by the square root of that figure, excludes stablecoins by rule, and has published live values since 1 January 2015.
- 30 constituents
- Square-root weighting
- Stablecoins excluded by rule
- Live since 1 January 2015
- Independent, fully rules-based
What is the Vinter Indices?
Vinter was a Swedish regulated index provider, by its own description the number one choice for ETF and ETP issuers in Europe, supplying single-asset and multi-asset indices: Vinter 10 variants, equal-weighted baskets, and co-branded strategy indices weighting by momentum, active addresses and even social-media interest. In November 2024 Vinter was acquired by the French market-data firm Kaiko, Kaiko’s third index acquisition after two earlier purchases in 2022 that included the Napoleon index business from CoinShares. It now operates within Kaiko Indices, with former Vinter clients, among them 21Shares, Virtune and Sygnum, migrated onto Kaiko’s platform. An index franchise assembled from three acquisitions in four years, with client migrations mid-stream, is itself a datum. A benchmark is supposed to be the still point of the financial system, and this one has changed owners, brands and APIs, while the CCi30 Cryptocurrency Index methodology has not changed at all.
How is the Vinter Indices built?
Client-driven: Vinter manufactures bespoke rule sets to issuer specification, equal weight, momentum, on-chain activity, social sentiment, thematic screens, each rebalanced on its own schedule under Swedish/EU benchmark regulation.
Where the Vinter Indices falls short statistically
An index factory is not an index
Vinter’s business model is the manufacture of benchmarks to order. Whatever the professionalism of execution, a made-to-measure benchmark inverts the epistemic relationship: the product defines the measure, rather than the measure disciplining the product.
When an issuer wants a “Web3 momentum social-interest index,” Vinter builds one, and its back-test, chosen during design, will flatter it (Vinter’s own analysts candidly note that including the in-sample design period would make performance “look too good”). Rules-basedy about the problem does not dissolve it.
Weighting by social-media interest
deserves specific attention as the reductio of discretionary index design. Market capitalization is the aggregated judgment of everyone risking capital; social-media volume is the aggregated output of everyone risking nothing.
Building portfolio weights on the latter converts an index into a sentiment-chasing strategy, legitimate as a strategy, disqualifying as a benchmark. The CCi30 weights by a fixed transform of the market’s own valuation and nothing else.
Strategy indices are hypotheses, not measurements
Momentum and active-address weightings encode falsifiable bets. Bets belong in funds. An index that embeds a bet cannot serve as the neutral yardstick against which the bet is judged, the function the CCi30 has performed, unchanged, since 2015.
Can the Vinter Indices be replicated by an investor?
Fine at the product level; that is the business. But each bespoke index lives only as long as its sponsoring ETP, so the family offers no durable market standard, the survivorship graveyard of custom crypto indices is already large. Under Kaiko ownership the model is unchanged, a competent regulated manufacturer of strategies wearing index clothing, with a new instability added: the benchmark administrator itself is now an acquisition target inside a consolidating data industry.
Method and sources
Methodology facts on this page come from the published documents of the provider; constituent lists change and should be re-verified before citation. The CCi30 rules are published in the methodology manual. The full comparison set is on the crypto index comparison hub, and the allocation calculator shows the CCi30 basket for any amount.