CoinDesk Indices: Powering the Next Generation of Crypto Financial Products

Learn how Lumitech helped CoinDesk Indices build a secure, scalable, and high-performance platform for digital asset index management. Discover our approach to developing a financial-grade system that supports real-time crypto indices powering some of the world’s leading ETFs and structured products.

About the Project

CoinDesk Indices is a market leader in the digital asset space, providing reliable crypto indices since 2014. With a client base that includes top-tier financial institutions and asset managers, CoinDesk Indices needed a powerful backend platform capable of processing real-time market data, ensuring institutional-grade accuracy, and offering flexible index creation.

The goal was to design and develop a platform that not only handles the fast-paced nature of crypto markets but also meets the strict performance, scalability, and security demands of enterprise clients in the financial sector.

Interesting Facts

• CoinDesk Indices is part of a global media and data powerhouse focused on blockchain and crypto innovation.

• The platform supports real-time index updates, minute-by-minute recalculations, and customizable methodologies.

• The system had to comply with rigorous financial and security standards used by top investment firms.

• The architecture was designed for long-term scalability, capable of supporting hundreds of indices and millions of data points.

• The Lumitech team worked in agile sprints over a 6-month development cycle, followed by an ongoing support and optimization phase under a dedicated SLA.

Client Request

CoinDesk Indices approached Lumitech with a clear mission: to create a backend infrastructure that could support a new generation of crypto index products. Their old system lacked real-time capabilities and couldn’t support the fast-evolving crypto market dynamics.

The new platform needed to be modular, secure, and built for performance. It should provide APIs and dashboards to manage index rules, monitor performance, and deliver data to partners and clients. Above all, it had to deliver high availability and consistent accuracy in a volatile and complex market.

Approach

To meet these requirements, we adopted a data-first, performance-driven development approach. Our team of backend engineers and architects focused on creating a real-time data pipeline capable of ingesting, processing, and recalculating indices with minimal latency.

We began by:

• Conducting deep-dive workshops with the client’s product and data teams.

• Mapping out the full lifecycle of index creation, update, and dissemination.

• Designing an infrastructure that can adapt to custom weighting methods, asset baskets, and data sources.

We ensured every component—from pricing feeds to calculation engines—was both modular and resilient.

Tools

• Node.js + TypeScript – For scalable backend services and REST APIs.

• PostgreSQL + TimescaleDB – For time-series data management with financial-grade precision.

• Kafka – For high-throughput real-time data streaming across services.

• Docker + Kubernetes – For container orchestration and deployment on a cloud-native stack.

• Grafana + Prometheus – For monitoring performance and uptime at scale.

Challenges

• Real-Time Price Aggregation Aggregating real-time data across multiple exchanges, while filtering out anomalies and spikes, was essential. We built a data integrity layer that detects outliers and recalculates weights on the fly.

• Index Flexibility and Customization CoinDesk Indices required support for dozens of methodologies—from market cap-weighted to equal-weighted indices. We built a customizable rule engine that allows users to define index logic via config files or the admin UI.

• Audit-Ready Accuracy As a foundation for financial products like ETFs, every index calculation had to be 100% auditable. We built a transparent audit trail system that logs every change, calculation, and data source.

• Enterprise API Design The platform had to expose clean, secure APIs for financial institutions. We implemented token-based authentication, rate limiting, and extensive documentation for all endpoints.

Core Features

• Real-Time Index Engine Our custom engine processes and recalculates hundreds of indices in real time, ensuring high availability and institutional accuracy.

• Custom Index Builder CoinDesk’s team can configure new indices using flexible rules and weighting systems, streamlining the product creation lifecycle.

• Secure Data Distribution Indexes are published via secure APIs to clients and partners. Real-time updates ensure the data stays accurate and actionable.

• Monitoring & Alerts Built-in monitoring dashboards allow the CoinDesk team to track system health, latency, and anomalies across all services.

Summary

This project was a significant milestone in Lumitech’s work in the fintech and crypto domain. Building a mission-critical platform that powers ETFs and financial instruments globally is both a technical and trust-based achievement.

At Lumitech, we specialize in creating secure, scalable, and high-performance systems for complex domains like finance, crypto, and digital infrastructure. If you’re looking to build the next breakthrough in financial technology, we’d love to help.

Let’s talk about how we can build your platform.