Benchmarks · Oct 3, 2026
The SDX Crypto Indices Are Gone. Here Is What Replaced Them
SDXSIXBenchmarks
SIX shut the SDX BTC, ETH and Bi-Cap indices on 31 January 2025 and named no successor. What the exchange still publishes, and which benchmarks cover each of those jobs.
If you are looking for the SDX BTC, SDX ETH or SDX Bi-Cap index, you are looking for something that stopped calculating on 31 January 2025.
SIX decommissioned all three. The announcement gave the reason in nine words: "as part of its ongoing efforts to streamline its product offering." One sentence in that notice matters more than the rest, and we will come back to it.
This is a short history of three Swiss crypto indices, an explanation of why a retired index is a bigger problem than it sounds, and a practical answer to the question that probably brought you here: what should you track instead.
What the SDX indices were
SDX was the digital asset arm of SIX, the operator of the Swiss stock exchange. Alongside its trading and settlement infrastructure, it published a small family of crypto benchmarks.
| Index | ISIN | What it tracked |
|---|---|---|
| SDX BTC Index | CH1129538182 | Bitcoin performance in USD |
| SDX ETH Index | CH1129538182 | Ether performance in USD |
| SDX Bi-Cap Index | CH1129538208 | The two largest digital assets combined |
The Bi-Cap has a documented starting point: it was set at 1,000 points on 2 August 2019, and the index family was announced by SIX in September 2021.
The Bi-Cap was the interesting one. "Bi-cap" meant exactly what it sounds like: a two-asset basket of bitcoin and ether, which in a market where those two carry most of the value is a defensible definition of the investable core.
For a European institution, these had a specific appeal. They came from a regulated exchange operator in a jurisdiction with a mature digital asset framework, which is a different proposition from a benchmark published by a crypto-native firm.
What happened on 31 January 2025
SIX retired all three indices on the same day.
The notice is short and unusually clear about one thing. It states plainly that the indices will not be transitioned to alternative ones. No successor ticker. No mapping to a replacement series. Anyone referencing SDX BTC in a document, a model or a product had to find their own way out.
That is the sentence worth noticing, and it is the reason this article exists. Index providers usually offer a migration path when they retire a series, precisely because people have built things on top of it. Here there was none.
The index retirement was not an isolated event. In October 2025 Bloomberg reported that the Swiss exchange group was bringing its SDX digital assets unit in-house, and SIX has since consolidated digital asset trading into SIX Swiss Exchange itself.
Which means searches for "SDX crypto indices" now sit on top of two separate stories: a product line that was retired, and a brand that was folded into its parent.
Why a decommissioned index is a real problem
A retired index sounds like a minor administrative event. It is not, and the reasons are worth spelling out because they apply to every benchmark you rely on.
Your history stops. An index is a continuous series, and its value comes from that continuity. When calculation ends, every chart that used it stops at the same date. Anyone comparing performance across that boundary is now splicing two different measurements together and calling it one line.
Documents that reference it break. A benchmark named in an investment policy statement, a fund prospectus or a client mandate does not quietly disappear. Somebody has to open those documents and change them, which in a regulated context means a process rather than a find-and-replace.
Backtests built on it become unreproducible. If your analysis used SDX Bi-Cap as a reference, nobody can rerun it from public data now. That is a quiet but real loss of auditability.
It tells you something about the provider. An index with real adoption is expensive to kill, because the provider has to field the complaints. One that can be retired cleanly, with no transition offered, was probably not underpinning much. That is useful information, in hindsight, about how widely it was actually used.
The general lesson: a benchmark is infrastructure, and infrastructure that can be switched off without a migration path was never as solid as it looked on the factsheet.
What SIX still publishes: the Crypto Market Index 10
The SDX line is gone, but SIX did not leave the category. Its surviving crypto benchmark is the SIX Crypto Market Index 10, ticker CMI10, ISIN CH0395449405.
This one has a properly documented rulebook, and since almost nobody writes about it in detail, here is what is actually inside.
The basics. Ten constituents, weighted by market capitalization. Base date 30 December 2016 at 1,000 points, with live calculation running since 9 January 2018. Reviews are quarterly, implemented on the third Friday of the quarter month, with additions, deletions and new coin counts announced a week before the implementation date.
The size and liquidity gates. To qualify, an asset needs an average market capitalization above USD 1 billion over the preceding 30 days, and average daily liquidity of at least USD 500,000 over the same window. Qualifying assets are ranked by market cap and the top ten are selected. If fewer than ten qualify, the index holds fewer than ten.
The exchange gates. This is where the methodology gets specific in a way most crypto indices are not. A trading venue only counts as an eligible price source if it supports crypto against USD, EUR or JPY, is investable by international asset managers, sits in a FATF or Moneyval member jurisdiction, provides an API feed with price, volume and timestamps, has operated stably for at least 18 months, holds meaningful market share, publishes in English, and runs a sustainable business model such as trading fee revenue.
The asset gates. An asset must trade against USD, EUR or JPY on at least two eligible exchanges, trade at least once a day, have a reliable multi-signature hardware wallet solution available, and show technological maturity through more than three months of continuous stable operation. Assets primarily designed for anonymity are excluded. So are index coins and pegged coins such as USDT. Memecoins are only eligible if whitelisted, and the rulebook notes that none currently are.
How prices are taken. Volume-weighted average prices over 60-second rolling windows from eligible exchanges, with top-of-book median bid and ask quotes used as a fallback when no trades occur in the window. Currency conversion runs through Netdania, or Tradermade if unavailable.
Forks. Generally not included unless a specific index explicitly describes otherwise.
Those exchange and custody gates are the real character of this index. It is built on the same instinct as the Nasdaq CME Crypto Index, which also screens on vetted exchanges and custodians: an asset that cannot be priced from a credible venue or held by a regulated institution has no business in a benchmark that institutions reference.
Live data and a full breakdown are on our SIX CMI10 page.
The other Swiss-linked option
If you came looking for a Swiss crypto benchmark, there is a second one worth knowing: the STOXX Digital Asset Blue Chip index, ticker SXDABCE, ISIN CH1213357705.
One clarification, because the Swiss ISIN invites a wrong assumption. STOXX is not part of SIX. It belongs to ISS STOXX, within the Deutsche Börse group. The index is Swiss-domiciled by ISIN rather than Swiss-operated.
It is a large-cap digital asset basket, and it has at least one product referencing it, which is more than most crypto indices can say.
Global alternatives, and how they compare
If your reason for using an SDX index was simply "a credible benchmark from a regulated operator," the field is wider now than it was in 2021.
| Index | Constituents | Weighting | Reconstitution |
|---|---|---|---|
| SIX CMI10 | 10 | Market cap | Quarterly, third Friday |
| Nasdaq CME Crypto Index | Variable | Free-float market cap | Quarterly |
| CoinDesk 20 | 20 | Capped at 30% and 20% | Quarterly |
| CCi30 | 30 | Square root of market cap | Quarterly constituents, monthly weights |
| CI100 | 100 | Four-factor blend | Continuous |
The replacement question has no single answer, because the SDX line covered two different jobs.
If you used SDX BTC or SDX ETH, you wanted a clean single-asset reference. Single-asset reference rates are widely available now from several administrators, and SIX itself publishes crypto average rates per asset against USD, EUR and JPY, which are launched and retired automatically as assets move in and out of eligibility.
If you used SDX Bi-Cap, you wanted the investable core in one number. The closest equivalents are the small capped baskets. The CoinDesk 5 behind one of the US listed products holds five assets; the CoinDesk 20 holds twenty with caps that deliberately pull weight away from bitcoin. Neither is a two-asset index, and as far as published benchmarks go, the tightly concentrated bi-asset construction is now rare.
How to avoid this happening again
Five checks before you write a benchmark name into anything that matters. All of them are answerable from public documents.
Who administers it, and is that their business? An index run as a side product by an operator whose core business is elsewhere is easier to retire than one that sits at the centre of a provider's revenue.
Are there products tracking it? Funds, ETPs and derivatives create switching costs for the provider. An index with no products attached can be withdrawn without anyone having to be consulted.
Is there a published continuity or transition policy? Serious administrators document what happens when a series is discontinued. The absence of such a policy is itself an answer.
Is the methodology public and reproducible? If the rulebook is published in full, as the SIX one is, you can reconstruct an approximation from public data if the official print ever stops. If the methodology is proprietary, the series ends when the provider says it ends.
How much of the published history is live? Many indices show years of backtested data before their launch date on one continuous line. Only the post-launch portion is a record of anything.
That last point connects back to why the SDX retirement stings. Those series had real history behind them, and when calculation stopped, that history became a dataset nobody is maintaining.
Frequently asked questions
What were the SDX crypto indices? Three crypto benchmarks published by SIX: the SDX BTC Index, the SDX ETH Index and the SDX Bi-Cap Index, tracking bitcoin, ether and a combined two-asset basket respectively.
When were the SDX indices discontinued? They were decommissioned on 31 January 2025, as part of what SIX described as an effort to streamline its product offering.
Were the SDX indices replaced? No. The decommissioning notice states explicitly that the indices were not transitioned to alternative ones.
What is the SIX crypto index now? The SIX Crypto Market Index 10, ticker CMI10, ISIN CH0395449405. Ten constituents weighted by market capitalization, reviewed quarterly, with a base of 1,000 points at 30 December 2016 and live calculation since 9 January 2018.
Is STOXX Digital Asset Blue Chip a SIX index? No. Despite its Swiss ISIN, STOXX is part of ISS STOXX within the Deutsche Börse group, not SIX.
What happened to SDX itself? The digital asset business was brought in-house, with digital asset trading consolidated into SIX Swiss Exchange. The venue and the indices are two separate stories that often get conflated in search results.
The short version
The SDX BTC, SDX ETH and SDX Bi-Cap indices stopped calculating on 31 January 2025 and were not replaced. SIX still publishes the Crypto Market Index 10, which has a more rigorous rulebook than most crypto benchmarks and is worth reading if you care about how eligibility is decided rather than only how weights are set.
If you need a benchmark you can rely on for years, the question to ask is not how good its methodology looks today. It is how costly it would be for the provider to switch it off.
Live data for CMI10 and the other major crypto benchmarks, side by side, is on our indices page.
Cryptoindex.ai is not affiliated with SIX, SDX, STOXX, Nasdaq, CME, CoinDesk or CCi30. Index details are as published by their respective administrators. Series shown on this site for third-party indices are public-data proxies rather than official prints. Nothing here is investment advice.