Index Coop DAO Raises $2.25M and Nears $500M in Managed Assets

There are a few ways to invest in crypto: throwing darts, buying whatever coin Elon Musk tweets about that week, or snatching up tokens you read about on Telegram. Index Cooperative DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) thinks sourcing the wisdom of the crypto in-crowd is a better way—and it's raising money to scale up its investing strategy.

Index Coop, which launched in October of last year to build and manage crypto indexes, announced today it has raised $2.25 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital India, Blockchain Ventures, and White Star Capital. This latest fundraise brings its reported total funding to $10 million, following an earlier seed round of $7.75 million led by Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital and 1kx.

Index Coop works a bit like an asset manager such as Vanguard or Merrill Lynch: it creates baskets of cryptocurrencies—mixing wrapped Bitcoin, Ethereum and others—that people can invest in. But instead of a Wall Street associate calibrating the composition of the index, it’s the DAO's members, who cast votes using $INDEX tokens. Index Coop’s most popular product, with a market cap of nearly $190 million, is the ETH 2x Flexible Leverage Index (which includes Compound Ether and stablecoin USDC).

Since its launch, the DAO, which is really more of a decentralized asset manager (call it a DAM), has accumulated hundreds of millions in assets under management, briefly surpassing the $500 million mark before the recent crypto correction brought its war chest closer to $400 million.

“We really see our mission is bringing safe, effective investing to everyone in the world,” Simon Judd, Index Cooperative’s business development working group lead, told Decrypt. “It's so easy for people to jump into crypto and just start chasing trends, chasing coins, and it's just not doing it in a really effective way.”

Judd said that although the DAO has a community of over 6,000 members on its Discord server, its core team tasked with daily operations (and being paid by the DAO) is around 100. The money raised will go toward expanding its full-time team and making certain the protocol remains financially stable.

In addition to the ETH 2x Flexible Leverage Index, Index Coop offers five other products: DeFi Pulse Index (DPI), Metaverse Index (MVI), Bankless BED Index (BED), BTC 2x Flexible Leverage Index (FLI-BTC), and Data Economy Index (DATA). But Judd says that newcomers can stick to a few basics: “What we found is every time we onboard family or friends or normal people into crypto, we're telling them to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum and buy DPI to get the exposure.”

That's probably smarter than throwing darts and seeing what sticks.