Showing a number is not the same as settling a contract against it.
Reading a published CrossDesk fixing is free. Referencing one in a contract — a fund prospectus, a margin agreement, a liquidation rule — requires a licence from the administrator. The same number is licensed more than once, to different people, for different rights. That is standard benchmark practice, not double-charging.
Use. Redistribute. Display.
1. Use / reference licence
Who: fund and ETP issuers, lenders — anyone whose contract settles against the fixing.
Grants: the right to reference the fixing in a contract.
Structure: a flat annual fee plus basis points on the assets that reference it — the index-licensing convention, priced against the AUM of the referencing products only, never per lookup.
2. Redistribution / vendor licence
Who: oracles, data vendors, terminals.
Grants: the right to carry and redisplay the fixing to their own users.
Structure: flat, per vendor, at feed level. Redistribution never substitutes for the use licence: where a fund reads the number is a distribution question; whether its contract settles against it is a licensing question.
3. Display licence
Who: websites, dashboards.
Grants: the right to show the fixing, attributed.
Structure: free or nominal. Display tiers may receive delayed or end-of-day values; the live feed is the paid tier.
Scope can be a single fixing, a family (one issuer's products), or the full feed. Feed-level is the natural unit for redistribution.
Not every counterparty is a customer.
Some are ingredients, some are signers, some are distribution. The fund licenses the fixing; the authorised participant pays per order; they are different companies buying different things — the same shape as an index fund paying the index licence while its authorised participants pay creation fees to the fund and nothing to the index provider.
| Who | Licence? | Per order? | What they actually are |
|---|---|---|---|
| A fund / ETP issuer | Yes | No | The customer. Licenses the fixing its product settles against. |
| An authorised participant / market maker | No | Yes, per order | The transaction payer. A flat fee per creation or redemption order. |
| A lender | Maybe, small | No | A committee seat, and the reason the number matters. May license separately if its own contracts reference the fixing. |
| An asset issuer (the issuer of a wrapped token) | No | No | Distribution and a committee seat. Never a payer. |
| A venue | No | No | Distribution and a committee seat. Benefits from volume, pays nothing. |
| An oracle / data vendor | Redistribution, small | No | A channel. |
Committee signers never pay, and are never paid. They already have money riding on the mark; attestation is a by-product of a position they hold. Paying an attestor turns them into a hired referee; charging them kills the supply of credibility. One committee serves unlimited licensees. A party may both sign and license, papered separately so neither is leverage over the other.
A flat fee per order. Not basis points.
An issuer charges the authorised participant a flat fee per creation unit to cover the cost of processing, precisely because it must not scale with the size of the trade — that would tax the arbitrage that keeps the fund glued to its NAV. The toll is on the turnstile, not on the flow.
Charged atomically
The fee settles in the same transaction that mints or burns the shares, from cash the AP disclosed when placing the order. No invoice, no terms, no collections.
No credit risk
No disclosed cash, no creation. The administrator cannot fail to be paid, and the AP cannot be charged for an order that did not settle.
No reconciliation
The receipt records the fee immutably, per order. The fee receiver need not be the administrator, so the fund's own administrator can be paid on the same rail.
Same computation. Two price tags.
What a fund accountant charges to strike a daily NAV. Disclosed by Brown Brothers Harriman in an SEC filing — and it fell 19% at the last renewal. Fund accounting is a commodity because the marks are not in doubt.
Approximately what the SPY trust pays S&P Dow Jones for the index it settles against: 0.03% of the daily size of the trust plus an annual licence fee of $600,000, stated in the trust's own filing.
One is accounting. One is a benchmark. Ten to fifteen times the money for the same arithmetic.
CrossDesk sells the second thing: the official price a contract settles against, aimed at marks people actually argue about — wrapped assets, baskets, funds whose underlying market is closed — where administration already commands a multiple of the commodity rate. If your assets are T-bills during market hours, you do not need CrossDesk, and this page says so.
0.325 bp: BBH Trust, Form N-CSR · 3 bp + $600,000: SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, Form N-30D. Rates for a CrossDesk licence are agreed per engagement and are deliberately below the incumbent index licensors; no rate card is published. No party has yet licensed a CrossDesk fixing.
Usage & licensing — contact.
For a use licence, a redistribution agreement, or a display attribution, write to the administrator. For a committee seat, see Governance.
Software licences for the CrossDesk code itself (the Daml packages, backend and desk) are a separate matter, governed by the repository's proprietary licence; enquiries to the same address.