The Best Business in Finance Nobody Can Enter.
Most people picture an index as a number on a screen. The S&P 500 up half a percent, the Nasdaq down a point.
Behind that number sits one of the most profitable business models in finance.
An index is a rules-based measure of a market or a defined set of assets. The provider does not trade, take positions, or run the ETF, futures contract, or perpetual built on top of it.
It maintains the methodology, publishes the number, and licenses the right to reference it.
That is where the money comes from.
In 2025, S&P Global’s Indices division generated $1.85B in revenue and $1.27B in operating profit, with roughly 69% operating margin.
MSCI’s Index segment generated $1.79B in revenue, with $770.7M coming from asset-based fees tied to assets and trading volume rather than fixed licensing.
The model has been hard to enter because index providers need high-quality data, rights to use that data, and distribution into products people actually trade.
Now a new set of venues needs indices the established providers were never structured to supply.
Exchanges, prediction markets, and onchain applications trade equities, commodities, and FX around the clock. They need prices that hold continuously on assets that were never priced that way.
Pyth Indices are live today across equities, metals, commodities, and FX, built on first-party data from the venues where these assets trade at every hour.
The set is growing.
Explore Pyth Indices: https://www.pyth.network/indices
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