Joe Sticco and Preston Van Loon, Cryptex

On this episode of The Scoop, The Block talks with Joe Sticco and Preston Van Loon, co-founders of Cryptex Finance, about building decentralized index products for the crypto market during the early 2021 bull run. Cryptex's flagship product, the Total Crypto Market Cap Token, or TCAP, is a synthetic asset designed to give holders exposure to the overall size of the cryptocurrency market rather than any single coin, collateralized and governed through a decentralized, community-run protocol.

The conversation takes place in early March 2021, a period when bitcoin and the broader crypto market were surging to new highs, Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem was expanding rapidly, and the network's transition toward proof-of-stake, following the Beacon Chain's launch a few months earlier, was drawing renewed attention to scalability and staking infrastructure.

Sticco and Van Loon discuss the origins of Cryptex and why they saw a need for a simple, tradeable way to bet on the crypto market's aggregate growth without picking individual winners, along with the mechanics of how TCAP's price tracks total market capitalization through an oracle-fed, collateralized minting system. Van Loon, whose background includes work on Ethereum client infrastructure, brings a technical perspective to the discussion of how the protocol sources reliable market cap data and manages collateralization risk during periods of high volatility, while Sticco speaks to the product and community-governance side of running a decentralized project.

The two also address how Cryptex approached decentralized governance from early on, letting token holders vote on protocol parameters rather than concentrating control with the founding team. The conversation also touches on the broader DeFi landscape at the time, including rising gas fees on Ethereum as usage surged, the growing interest in synthetic and index-style products as a category, and how smaller teams were competing for liquidity and attention against better-capitalized protocols. Sticco and Van Loon share their outlook on where decentralized index products fit into the maturing DeFi ecosystem as it grew increasingly sophisticated. The episode captures the ambitions of a small, technically minded team building infrastructure at the height of DeFi's early-2021 momentum.