
Jessica Ellerm and Kent Grogan discuss Themelia's approach to custom crypto indexing and the challenges of investing in digital assets.
Jessica Ellerm and Kent Grogan are the co-founders of Themelia, a platform building the next infrastructure layer for crypto investment through custom indexing technology. Jessica comes from a fintech background — including a stint at ASX-listed payments platform Tyro and a superannuation startup she founded and sold — while Kent ran a hedge fund for years before moving into portfolio management and FinTech. Together, they're tackling one of the most underserved problems in digital assets: how do you get sensible, risk-adjusted exposure to a market of 52 million tokens without getting wrecked? Why you should listen Crypto has a reputation problem, and Kent and Jessica argue it's largely structural. Most tokens are created, pump briefly, and go to zero — which means a naive index that mirrors the full market is essentially a vehicle for buying failure at scale. The Themelia thesis is that an index needs to do better than that: not just collapse the market into something manageable, but actively filter for tokens with genuine staying power before they've already made their biggest moves. Kent draws a sharp analogy to equities — nobody in TradFi just buys one marquee stock and calls…
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