Bitcoin trading gained another foothold in the mainstream investment world yesterday, as Bloomberg Professional competitor Thomson Reuters Eikon added BTC/USD prices to its trading suite. The system is used by over 320,000 subscribers, including many professional and Wall Street traders. Eikon’s bitcoin dashboard includes current rates and trade volume data from BitStamp, as well as access to a suite of visualization and analysis tools.
The blog post announcing the bitcoin integration claimed that “strong consumer demand” inspired the inclusion. Eikon’s post explained that although total daily bitcoin volume is currently in the relatively “modest” (by Wall Street standards) $60-$70 million range, the digital currency is “proving to be extremely durable,” growing rapidly with negligible corporate or state support for much of the past five years. The post also noted that bitcoin survived the collapse of its largest exchange, Mt.Gox, with marginal impact on the price.
Clearly, Thomson Reuters believes that bitcoin is something worth watching.
Eikon is something of a late adopter, following months after Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance added basic bitcoin pricing data to their systems. That said, when a relatively conservative service like Eikon decides that bitcoin is worth listing alongside foreign currencies and Main Street-courting stocks, it’s almost certainly a sign that Wall Street is paying attention.
