With massive 24-hour trading volumes and daily news of large companies building exposure, businesses everywhere are clamoring to begin including cryptocurrency in their investment portfolios.

Indeed, the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies today easily exceeds that of the high-yield bond market and Bitcoin is quickly closing the gap on gold as the worldwide store-of-value of choice. Furthermore, hedge funds across the globe are increasingly moving funds into this emerging asset class.

To serve this growing clientele of corporate investors, an entire ecosystem of business-focussed tools has started to appear. Today, we would like to discuss just a few of these products and services, each designed to make crypto investing easier, safer, and more profitable.

One of the main differences between private and corporate investing is accountability. Individual investors only have to answer to themselves regarding their decisions, while businesses have to be ready to rationalise each investment decision to a wide range of stakeholders, such as shareholders, partners, and even clients.

A number of free and paid services have become available today to help corporations get the information they need to build and justify their crypto investment strategies. These include platforms that gather market statistics, aggregate crypto-financial news, and that make it easy to understand the inner workings of the blockchain networks themselves.

Market statistics
For any asset class, there exists a list of standard indicators that investors use to make good decisions. For trading exchange tokens, including cryptocurrencies, the most interesting statistics are considered to be the following:

• 24-hour trading volume: Number of the coins or tokens, or the total value of the coins or tokens, traded over the past twenty-four hours.
  
  
• Circulating supply: Sum total of the cryptoasset that has been issued.
  
  
• Maximum supply: The maximum quantity of the asset that can ever be issued.
  
  
• Market Cap: Total value of the asset on the market, calculated by multiplying the market price by the circulating supply.

Keeping track of these figures has become as easy for crypto as is has for stocks and bonds since the rise of mobile applications. Two of the most popular crypto-market-focussed sites for quick reference are CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. Both of these platforms allow users to create watchlists and track their own portfolios in real time.

What's more, platforms like CryptoCompare or Messari provide more in depth statistics as well as information relating to specific altcoins and alternative digital assets (like ICO tokens). These sites are particular useful when trying to get a better understanding of what specific projects in the blockchain space are up to.

News aggregators and calendars
Professional stock traders have been using news aggregators to make decisions for ages. It is not surprising that a number of crypto-specific aggregation sites have come along, as well, to provide investors with real-time updates. Some of the most popular of these services are CryptoPanic, Cryptorank, FAWS, and Crypto News.

Crypto news aggregators are available in many languages and a variety of UIs that fit just about any user preference. These sites don't only provide essential value to day traders, but also to investors pursuing long-term strategies.

It is also worthwhile to keep track of events that occur on the blockchain networks themselves, such as forks and halvings. These can be tracked using tools like CoinMarketCal. Even lesser-known blockchains can be tracked using these platforms.

Blockchain explorers
As we've discussed already in another blog post, certain key indicators can, in fact, be analyzed in order to ascertain a kind of "fundamental" or even "intrinsic" value for cryptoassets. For instance, transactional activity can serve as an indicator of future price movement. An increase in miner payouts on a network shows that the blockchain has become more secure and therefore, arguably, more valuable. This, in turn, could be interpreted as the network's 'capital expenditure.'

Indicators like these can be checked using specialised tools called blockchain explorers. The most commonly used of these is probably blockchain.com, along with other sites (like Etherchain and Blockcypher) that are maintained to display information about every other network.

In order to begin investing in and trading cryptocurrencies, you need a "gateway" onto the blockchain - a way to turn your "off-chain" assets, such as the fiat currency sitting in your bank account, into something that can be traded "on-chain." This is where the cryptocurrency exchange comes into play.

Today, cryptocurrency exchanges are regulated, reliable, and fully-legitimate businesses that have become fully-integrated into global economic processes. Holding licenses that are issued in jurisdictions all around the world, exchanges accept transfers from bank accounts and convert national currencies into crypto. Protected by advanced cryptography and held accountable to protect wallet keys and customer data, contemporary exchanges today can be trusted.

Crypto Exchange for Business
Any company interested in getting started with cryptoassets needs four key things from their exchange: liquidity, security, low fees, and business-focussed compliance. Until recently, however, it was hard to find all four of these things in a single exchange. That is, until ALTERXE came along, bringing multiple financial technologies together to provide the best possible service to corporate clients.

Not your typical cryptocurrency brokerage, ALTERXE aggregates live rates from a long list of leading exchange platforms to get their clients the best conditions for their trades. Combined with rocket-fast corporate-client onboarding, dedicated support, EU-licensure, and PCI-standard data security, this is truly the business-friendly service that enterprises require.

Decentralised Exchanges
Decentralised Exchanges (DEXs) are another kind of trading option. Run fully on-chain by decentralised organisations, these innovative exchanges cannot deal with fiat. What they can do, however, is facilitated trades of mainstream exchange tokens for even the most obscure alternative digital assets. As stablecoins gain in adoption, and as cryptocurrencies increasingly are used in traditional business, this type of exchange will almost certainly gain in popularity.

Two of the most popular DEXs are IDEX and Uniswap. Decentralised exchanges are especially good for businesses that operate mostly on-chain or that pursue more advanced cryptoasset investment strategies.

One of the primary differences between crypto and other asset classes is the way that it is stored and transferred. While things like stocks, cash deposits, and bonds are subject to the custodianship of financial service providers, such as banks and brokers, cryptoassets are always under the control of the investor. This is made possible using cryptocurrency wallets.

A cryptocurrency wallet is a piece of technology that enables blockchain users to receive on-chain assets and send them to other participants on the network. Now that cryptocurrencies have started to have huge trading volumes, devices and software have been developed that make these wallets truly enterprise-grade.

Software and Hardware Wallets for Business
Businesses that maintain crypto portfolios today can enjoy a number of key security options for their assets:

• Cross-platform access:
  Many wallets can give access to funds through any device - on the go, in the office, or at home. We discuss this in more detail here.
  
  
• Multisignature (multisig) protocols:
  Businesses can specify which team members have access to which funds and require the consent of multiple stakeholders to carry out transactions.
  
  
• Secure Backups:
  Many services exist that facilitate "freezing cold" storage for corporate wallet backup keys. Companies can opt to keep backups in secure vaults behind advanced hardware and cryptography.

Depending on the level of access to funds your business requires, you may choose to use a software- or a hardware-based wallet solution. Or, you may decide to use a mixture of both.

Software wallets (like Metamask, MyEtherWallet) are free and easy to set up. They give quick access to funds while ensuring excellent security. Hardware wallets (like Ledger and Trezor) are physical devices that restrict all risk of user error while adding a couple extra security steps to the payments process. This option is preferable for long-term asset storage.

The accountability that businesses must keep regarding their investments is not just for their stakeholders, but also for tax authorities. As we have discussed in detail in another article, many kinds of cryptoasset transactions are subject to taxation and most operations must be reported.

Fortunately, over the past few years, a number of specialised platforms have been launched that automate this process, much in the same way as such well-known products as Quickbooks and TurboTax do for traditional business and investment.

Gilded, ZenLedger, and TaxBit are just a few of the services that are automating crypto-tax declarations. These are typically SaaS platforms that offer tiered pricing models. While they can't ever replace a good tax attorney who specialises in cryptocurrencies, these products certainly provide good value.