The Winklevoss twins’ Bitcoin price index called Winkdex went online as fully accessible beta version.
Some people just don’t give up. Neither do the twins, who had burned about $1.7 million after BitInstant instantly vanished from the radars. Well, you know things like this happen when owner is being charged with money laundering. However, earlier this month it became known that the brother’s lawyer is working on the implementation of the exchange-trust fund (ETF) and as the legal framework is being prepared, another indicator of the Winklevoss deep involvement with Bitcoin arrived on the vasts of Internet.
The website is a property of the Wiklevoss company Math-Based Asset Index, LLC. The data on the prices is gathered from the top three Bitcoin markets by the transaction volume and the weighted exponential moving average of this volume is used to create the output exchange rate. The average is taken in trailing two-hour periods. Thus, to ensure that the data is “fresh”, the older the transaction, the exponentially less weight it gives to the final BTC price. By the way, Mt.Gox is displayed in the chart, but since no one can actually get their money out of the dying Tokyo exchange, it does not qualify to be the variable in the Winkdex equation.
Speaking of design. The look is actually pretty neat, strict black and white safe for the colorful chart and “beta” sign near the head of the site. However, functionality is lacking, especially annoying is the fact that I cannot rescale the chart or zoom to a particular interesting region.
The name of the index has already been ridiculed by the cryptocommunity, but if one digs for a while it seems like everything that is being touched by Winklevoss is made fun of by Internet trolls. Well, the twins can thank Fincher for that, as in his film “The Social Network” they were not portrayed as serious entrepreneurs but rather oppositely.
Anyway, it’s understood that Winkdex is the tool for the brother’s much more massive project – the ETF, that is going to be launched this year and that only means more investment into crypto, so why bother with image constructed by internet jesters?