City A.M.’s Crypto Insider Speaks to Jonathan DeCarteret, Co-founder & CEO of INDX Capital
INDX co-founder and CEO JonathanDeCarteret’s crypto experience will be a familiar story to many fellow crypto investors.
In 2017, Jonathan decided he’d had enough of constantly checking his crypto portfolio, weathering a volatile market and rarely seeing his family in the process. Thinking there must be a more stable way to generate revenue in the cryptosphere, Jonathan started working on a way to invest in masternodes – part of the infrastructure that verifies transactions for certain cryptocurrencies. A year later, he launched INDX, a masternode portfolio token that invests in a range of the best-performing masternodes and generates a passive income to distribute to token holders.
Masternodes are the “hot new theme” for crypto assets in 2018, according to Dan Enright of IBM. DeCarteret explains them as: “The infrastructure that is going to power cryptocurrencies in the near future. To put that into context, last year 30 cryptocurrencies supported masternode infrastructure. This year already there are more than 340, and we estimate that there will be 1,000 by the end of the year.”
So what are Masternodes?
Masternodes are essentially servers that keep a full copy of the blockchain in real-time, processing and verifying transactions on the network. Each time a block of transactions is verified, it generates revenue for its owner. It is an attractive option for crypto investors: a way of making passive income without playing the cryptocurrency market.
However, there are analytical, financial and technical obstacles that make it difficult for retail crypto investors to invest in masternodes independently. DeCarteret says: “The first obstacle is doing the analysis. If you choose the wrong masternode, you could see your stake devalue as the currency devalues, even though you’re generating revenue. The second obstacle is financial. You need to put a stake into the Masternode, which can be as much as $1m for a well-regarded masternode like DASH. Finally, you need a certain amount of technical understanding to set these things up on a Linux server.”
INDX overcomes these obstacles by using proprietary technology to scan and analyse the market and determine the best-performing masternodes in which to invest. Investors can buy tokens in the portfolio which means they can benefit from income generated by the masternodes, while reducing the risk of investing without detailed knowledge. This allows investors to diversify their capital rather than collateralising all of it into one masternode.
As DeCarteret says: “It’s a great way to beat the current bear market within the cryptocurrency investor pool. It’s also a good way to diversify your holdings. Fifty per cent of the rewards are returned to token holders quarterly, 25 per cent re-invested back into the portfolio to identify future masternodes, and the remaining 25 per cent goes towards R&D and the operational cost of managing the platform.”
The company is conducting an ICO in the fourth quarter of 2018. Proceeds from the ICO will be used to stake masternodes, hosting them on enterprise-level servers with built-in redundancy, and protecting them with leading security systems.
The INDX team includes people from both crypto and traditional finance backgrounds. DeCarteret's vision is to de-risk the process of investing in crypto for traditional investors. His goal, he says, is to position INDX at the forefront of the community. “We want to make investing in masternodes an essential component of the investment fund of the future.”
For more information see indx.capital
