The two of the biggest assets in the crypto sector just got left off a list built by the biggest name in indexing. On July 21, the new S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index went live, and neither Bitcoin (BTC -1.30%) nor XRP (XRP -0.71%) is among its constituents.
The index ranks blockchains by protocol revenue, which is the fees that networks incur for use. And because S&P is already looking to seed future exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track the index, being left out could cost those two coins dearly. Are they still worth buying?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
The main inclusion criteria boxes out these coins
The S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index only includes coins that clear certain thresholds for size and liquidity, and being on the list also requires positive protocol revenue during two consecutive quarters. The crypto assets that meet these qualifying criteria are then ranked by how much protocol revenue they bring in, and their weighting in the index is adjusted relative to their market cap. The revenue is the result of users paying a chain transaction fees.
The revenue ranking keeps adding cryptos until it captures almost all of the eligible field's revenue, which today stops at 18 coins and resets each quarter.
CRYPTO: BTC
Key Data Points
Bitcoin's transaction fees flow to its miners rather than to holders, so it clears the other eligibility bars but fails the revenue test outright. XRP, on the other hand, had chain revenue of $2.3 million in 2025. Next to Ethereum, which brought in $285.4 million in protocol revenue last year, that's hardly anything; XRP simply didn't collect enough money to make it into the limited number of spots in the index.
Does this weaken the thesis for XRP?
Ripple, XRP's issuer, has spent years selling the XRP Ledger (XRPL) as plumbing for a variety of purposes in the financial industry, so being passed over by an index that's built to reward platforms that are in demand is somewhat significant.
Pantera likens its qualification criteria to the S&P 500's viability test, and it expects the roster to widen only as protocols route more value to tokenholders. That last tidbit -- value accruing to tokenholders specifically as a qualification criterion -- is another reason XRP didn't make the cut. The fees that XRP generates are used to burn coins and reduce the circulating supply, but the fees are so small that they don't make any real impact on the coin's circulating supply.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
The main risk here is that XRP could lose out in the future. S&P and Pantera built the benchmark to create the opportunity for it to underpin index products, so if an asset manager wraps it into a crypto ETF, there would eventually be capital inflows that would reach the 18 constituents, and skip everything else.
For now, no fund tracks the index yet, so the worry is hypothetical. But XRP investors will probably not be very pleased with their holdings if every other crypto major save Bitcoin is getting new (and potentially large) passive purchasing from ETFs.
So are they still worth buying?
For Bitcoin, the new index doesn't change anything. It's a store of value, not a quasi-business that can bring in revenue and distribute it to holders.
XRP's case is a bit more bearish. It still has potential catalysts and a roadmap to boost the utilization of its chain by onboarding more institutional users and more capital. Still, being left out of the index is obvious evidence of the lack of value accrual for tokenholders. This is an issue that the coin's skeptics, and increasingly some of its evangelists, have groused about for years.
But it's also true that not being in the index has no direct detrimental impact on its price. So, don't sell it, but be aware that the same reason it's not on the index is why it might not be very lucrative to hold even if its ambitions for the future are realized.
