U.S. Rating Agency, Weiss Ratings, has said that it will assign grades to various cryptocurrencies, which will be published on 24th of January. As well as rating bitcoin, the agency will also publish its assessments of many other popular cryptocurrencies such as ethereum, bitcoin cash, dash and litecoin.

Since it was founded in 1971, Weiss Ratings has graded around 55,000 investments and institutions such as credit unions, national and regional banks, stocks and insurance companies. Unlike other well-known rating agencies such as Moody\'s, Standard & Poor\'s, Weiss Ratings does not accept any form of compensation from those investments and institutions which it rates.

The cryptocurrency ratings issued on Wednesday are the first to be calculated by any U.S rating agency. Weiss Ratings say that they have spent many hours analysing hundreds of thousands of data points on the usage of each coin, trading patterns on coin exchanges, and the technology used to develop each cryptocurrency.

The ratings should enable investors to better assess the risk associated with each form of cryptocurrency before they put their money into the market and are also likely to be used by investment funds which may limit which cryptocurrencies fund managers can invest in depending on the ratings.