Nasdaq Risk Platform Director Separates Eligibility From Calculation in a Live Digital-Asset Series

Lev Yatsemyrskyi has spent nearly six years on institutional integrations for the Nasdaq Risk Platform. At the end of 2025 he is still in that role, Director of Client Integrations and AI Functionality, while a separate project he started is already producing numbers.

Xentaura, the New York platform he founded, has three production indexes live since April 1, 2025. ^XTCI5 tracks the leading five eligible assets by market capitalization outside bitcoin and ether. ^XTCIMC covers the next twenty. ^XTCIE70 follows the next seventy. They are recomposed twice a month. Composition changes stay visible. Values are available through an API.

The indexes exist to keep different economic things separate. A stablecoin, a wrapped token, a liquid-staking receipt and a freely traded asset can sit next to one another in a raw market-cap ranking and still not be the same exposure. Xentaura’s methodology excludes the first three categories so a reader can see whether the large, intermediate and emerging freely priced segments are moving together or splitting. That separation is the contribution. Without it, a single ranking mixes instruments that do not behave the same way under stress.

The design choice comes from the systems he works on at Nasdaq. Those systems have to remain interpretable when markets do not behave normally. Eligibility, calculation and interpretation are kept distinct so that a later reader can tell what was included, how the number was produced, and what the number is being used to observe. The indexes apply the same separation to a market that routinely mixes the three.

“Nasdaq has its own indexes. So do the Dow and the S&P 500,” he said. “I kept asking why the crypto market did not have the same kind of top benchmarks — a top five, then the next twenty, then the next seventy — built with clear rules instead of a single undifferentiated ranking. That is why I started Xentaura.”

Xentaura does not claim institutional adoption or performance. It claims a rules-based series that can be consumed programmatically and compared over time. That is a narrower statement than most crypto data products make.

Tokenized versions of conventional instruments are already appearing in pilot form across the industry. Those instruments sit outside the Xentaura eligibility rules. The indexes are built to measure the freely priced digital-asset segments next to them, not to include them.