Business news and financial information company Bloomberg has joined forces with Galaxy Digital Capital Management to launch the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index. The index has been designed to track the performance of the largest, most liquid portion of the cryptocurrency market.

The BGCI is a market capitalisation weighted index, which measures the performance of 10 cryptocurrencies.

Currently, Bitcoins makes up 30 per cent of the index, Ethereum 30 per cent, Ripple 14.1 per cent, Bitcoin Cash 10.6 per cent, EOS 6.1 per cent, Litecoin 3.8 per cent, Dash 1.7 per cent, Monero 1.7 per cent, Ethereum Classic 1 per cent and Zcash 1 per cent.

Bloomberg Indices global product manager Alan Campbell says: “The launch of the index reflects our clients’ growing interest in cryptocurrencies.”

Earlier this month Goldman Sachs hired a “digital assets” trader, making it the first Wall Street investment bank to set up a cryptocurrency trading desk. According to reports Goldman Sachs will start by trading Bitcoin futures.

In December the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange started trading Bitcoin derivatives.

Photographic company Kodak has announced that it plans to raise $50 million through an initial coin offering to support the development of a blockchain service, KodakOne, which is an image rights management platform. To date is has sold more than US$2 million of KodakCoin.

Not everyone in the financial establishment is won over, however. In March, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, said that the semi-anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies meant they were potentially a major new vehicle for money laundering and even financing terrorism.

The current Bitcoin price is around A$11,755. After hitting its peak of A$25,717 on December 17, Bitcoin traded below A$9000 in February and again in March.