White Star Capital Digital Asset Fund - Index Coop: the Blackrock of Web3
The DAO ecosystem continues to grow at breakneck speed with a level of innovation that will be examined for decades to come. From the early days of The DAO, there has always been a fascination with the unique structure and possibilities of running a decentralized organization.
White Star Capital recently published a few thoughts on the DAO ecosystem and how we think DAOs will become as familiar to most as large corporations.
One DAO we’ve been following quite closely that we think exemplifies some of the qualities laid out in our DAO Economy article is Index Coop.
Index Coop is focused on creating and maintaining on-chain crypto index products. Said simply, Index Coop is the go-to ETF manager for Web3. Several of their flagship products include the DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI), Ethereum 2x Flexible Leverage Index, ($ETH2x-FLI) and the Metaverse Index ($MVI). Index Coop is the largest crypto-native on-chain asset manager with over $400m of total value locked (TVL).
What makes Index Coop different from Blackrock in traditional markets, or even Grayscale or Bitwise in crypto markets, is the fact that anyone from around the world can contribute to the network in any way that adds value. A curious outsider can join one of the weekly new-joiner calls, learn about the organization and determine where their skills might be a fit – whether that’s in the engineering, growth or creative working groups (just to name a few). That outsider-turned-insider can then join the weekly specific working group calls and go deeper down the Index Coop rabbit hole to find their niche. The best part about it all is that none of this is theory – it’s happened before and continues to happen regularly.
The rate of innovation within the community is impressive even to the seasoned crypto native. The Pulse Aggregate Yield index, the Data Economy Index, the Robot Index and even DAO Jones Index are just a few examples of what’s being built behind the scenes. New discussions and proposals on the forum continue to inspire other DAOs – we have even seen several examples of new DAOs using index coop as a model when implementing new policies and procedures.
Index Coop has shown itself to be a model organization for DAOs, both new and old.
Let’s not forget that Index Coop itself owns a valuable, income producing protocol. Index Coop is approaching $3 million of cumulative revenue since inception one year ago and has surpassed $4 million annual run rate revenue. The rest of the KPIs tell a similar story.
After having spent several months engaged with the team and contributing to the forum & Discord server, we are extremely excited to be further aligned Index Coop as part of their $INDEX strategic treasury diversification round alongside Sequoia, Blockchain Ventures, Galaxy Digital, 1kx and other phenomenal partners.
We see a not too distant future where Index Coop will be the next multi-billion dollar asset manager – and perhaps the first multi-trillion dollar crypto asset manager.