Meet the Contributors - Joe

Weekly, Cryptex will interview one of the core contributors involved in building the world's first Total Crypto Market Cap Token (TCAP). This week, co-founder and CEO Joe Sticco, a lifelong trader and investment manager, shares his vision of combining Wall Street with world-class blockchain development. Read on to learn about how the Cryptex team came together, Joe's favorite community meme, and more.

"How did you get the idea for Cryptex?"

• I mean, the idea for a Total Crypto Market Cap token just kind of came to me. I have a background in trading and investing and I just wanted to build something that was meaningful in the space, that I felt was missing or needed. I would see everybody quoting data metrics like, "Oh, Total Crypto Market Cap went to this or it went to this." And next to Bitcoin and Ethereum, it was like the most widely quoted metric that I would see people discussing, yet it had no available means to function as a tradable asset. So once I started to piece that together, it just kind of came to my head like, "Go build it." Like, go build the S&P 500 of Crypto. And I think that moment was kind of like the, "Oh shit." moment in my life. Why did no one else think of this? And once I realized that it wasn't out yet and no one else had thought of it, it was just that thing that was right in front of you. Like this makes so much sense, like go build it. And that was kind of how I came up with it.

"How did you bring everyone together?"

• The first thing that you do when you have ideas obviously is you sit down with the people that are close to you. You share them with your friends. And Matz was the first person that I called at the time. Matz was doing his thing with different major corporations in terms of branding and marketing and all those aspects. And when you have an idea and you have people close to you, it's still just an idea, right? Like it's like a sketch. So you're basically calling people and you're saying to them, "Hey, I'd like you to dedicate X amount of years of your life in building this with me." Not knowing if you're going to succeed or not, right?
• So I made that phone call to Matz who had been in Crypto for a bit at that point, buying and selling different things. And instantaneously he was like, "Let's do it. How do we do it?" We had a developer at the time that we were friendly with, and I started telling him about the system that I wanted to create. And we had like a really interesting, I guess you would call it a sketch, but the problem with it was it didn't function. Like there was no collateral system, there were no vaults, there was no anything. It was just a mathematical equation of Total Crypto Market Cap divided by 10 billion and just a bot basically making that look like real-time numbers. So that obviously didn't work. It was after that that we met Preston, and then it worked. Preston came in and obviously we know he's building Ethereum 2, and he's very, very entwined in the space. So once he came on board, the system began to take shape and actually have a purpose in terms of functionality and use cases. After that, Cris came on board through Preston. The core team; myself, Matz, Preston, and Cris was assembled and we just went to work.

"What is your role at Cryptex?"

• Well, I'm a co-founder and I work with the team, but Cryptex is also a decentralized application. So we're really all co-founders, myself, Matz, and Preston. Cris is a blockchain developer with the team. I would guess Tom would be the chief of branding. Preston would be the blockchain lead and I would be the CEO.

"What is the overlap or lack of in DeFi versus traditional finance"

• Well, I mean DeFi is essentially like traditional finance, but completely autonomous and trustless, right? So you're essentially applying the same principles that you would in the traditional market space with things like lending protocols or staking or Oracles. All of these different things are what you learn in traditional finance, they're just being applied now a different way. And I've been in the financial space since I was 19 years old. So I have 18 years of my life just dedicated to the same thing. Taking the principles that I learned throughout my career in traditional finance and applying them to blockchain and to decentralized finance, really was like the pinnacle where now we can build fully trustless autonomous networks that function with zero intermediaries. Just autonomous. Zero interactions other than what started at the smart contract level.

"What's a fun fact that people don't know about you?"

• Oliver makes all the music for the Cryptex videos. Everybody thinks I make them, but Oliver does.

"What's the best Cryptex meme you've seen?"

• There are like thousands of them. The best one that I think I've seen was a frog staring at a screen with my picture on the wall and my dog underneath the frog. That was probably my favorite. I mean, the fact that anything that has to do with my dog, or that he's internet famous I think is probably like the sickest aspect of this to me is because he's just a little dog. Tons of people have seen memes of him. And I think that that's pretty intense. Like everybody in the community knows who he is and that's pretty sick man.

This concludes our interview with Joe. Stay tuned to catch our Core Team interview with Matz next week.

***CRYPTEX IS A FAIR LAUNCH PROTOCOL

1. NO ICO
2. NO VC FUNDING
3. NO PRE-SALE
4. CTX TOKENS ARE REWARDED AND ARE NEVER PURCHASED FROM CRYPTEX.****