Bloomberg and Kaiko, the industry’s leading cryptocurrency data provider, are pleased to announce the issuance of the first series of Financial Instrument Global Identifiers covering crypto assets, enabling further interoperability between industry participants, including digital asset exchanges, data aggregators, custodians, service providers and regulators

The Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) is an open standard of the Object Management Group (OMG)— the international, open membership, non-profit technology standards consortium — for the issuance of unique identifiers assigned to financial instruments including equities, derivatives, bonds, municipals, and currencies. In September 2021, FIGI was accredited as a U.S. national standard by the Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. (X9). Kaiko and Bloomberg officially released the first batch of FIGIs for all Bitcoin and Ethereum instruments denominated in fiat currencies.

With the rapid growth of the cryptocurrency industry, there is a pressing need for standardization to bring consistency, transparency, and greater efficiency to the market. Earlier this year, Kaiko was approved by OMG as Certified Provider for Crypto FIGIs, working alongside Bloomberg as the Registration Authority for FIGI.

FIGIs will be assigned at three levels of granularity: asset, currency pair, and trading platform. Application of the FIGI hierarchy in this way will provide all market players with greater transparency and a broader view across the sector.

The FIGI standard will now be compatible with and complement alternative standards. 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 ISO’s future Digital Token Identifier (DTI).

Ambre Soubiran, CEO of Kaiko. said “The lack of taxonomic, regulatory, and classification standards is one of the cryptocurrency industry’s greatest pain points today. We believe that FIGIs for crypto assets will vastly improve interoperability between service providers and bring much-needed uniformity to the sector.”

Market participants throughout the traditional finance and crypto industries will soon be able to incorporate crypto asset FIGIs into their core infrastructure, enabling a coherent view of market data across multiple providers and applications.

Ian Rogers, Chief Experience Officer of Ledger, said, “Ledger product supports more than 3,000 crypto assets, and the ability to identify these assets and fetch key data is critical for our success A single unified instrument code will not only greatly improve our scalability and resilience, but will also bring high value to our users. FIGI is a much-needed initiative in the crypto industry that we are eager to support and onboard.”

Stéphane Duzan, Chief Operating Officer of Société Générale – Forge, said, “Consistent standards and market practices, such as the open source initiatives FIGI and CAST® Framework, are essential to achieve digital assets adoption FIGI fosters product identification of digital assets by providing to the industry unified identifiers at a global scale. It is an effective tool compatible with existing identifiers, such as the ISIN code, and expected to be broadly used by market participants.”

Simon Forster, Co-Head of TP ICAP Digital Assets, said, “The crypto asset class is in its infancy and requires structure and standardization to further drive adoption. At TP ICAP Digital Assets, we believe harmonizing the approach to instrument identifiers is crucial for multi chain interoperability and tokenization. We are excited with how this initiative will propel the future for financial markets.”

Source: Bloomberg