My Story

Welcome! My name is Alex Masmej, and I’m a founder born in France, currently living in London. My goal is to build a disruptive, profitable company (or protocol) that could significantly improve the world. For the next 10 years of my life, I chose to focus on the crypto industry, specifically consumer-facing applications (based on Ethereum smart contracts).

Last summer, I joined the Ethereum ecosystem via MetaCartel DAO, a bottom-up ecosystem of builders. They’re like my family and you should consider joining us if you’re new to the industry.

Then I co-founded 2 communities in the following months:

• Marketing DAO, the unofficial Ethereum decentralized marketing agency, backed by Consensys and operated by world-class Ethereum communicators. Its aim is to grow Ethereum as a brand.
• the Undercollaterized DeFi Alliance, a think tank-style group aiming to brainstorm around DeFi lending, identity and unsecured lending. I shared my learnings on The DeFiant and DeFiPrime.

The latter helped me give birth to Rocket, a project I founded that gave loans against NFTs. Our shared lending pool managed 170 ETH (around ~$60,000) and returned 6.01% on ETH in 7 months. Amongst other things, Rocket performed the first ever crypto art-backed loan and the first ever domain name-backed loan.

After a few months of operating Rocket, COVID-19 happened and everyone’s mental model of what truly matters suddenly shifted. It was time for me to find a bigger market pull, a true breakthrough that could bring crypto unique advantages to the world: a fairer, cheaper, faster, globally accessible financial system.

Just as COVID-19 unfolded, I needed money to carry on exploring the crypto idea maze. I had this token, $ALEX, a cryptocurrency on Ethereum that I had previously created, sitting unused. I just had my only (and first!) revenue cut because of COVID, and I also did a fat finger trade that lost me a lot of money. I was broke.

So I decided to try something scary: sell 10% of the $ALEX token supply against $20,000, claiming to give some of my future income for the next 3 years. I announced it at ETHCC, an Ethereum conference in my hometown, Paris, not knowing what the outcome would be. The goal was to bring me to San Francisco, but international travel restricts me from it, although I’m still determined to make it.

It was an experiment, and I thought it was a win-win for people who supported me. Turns out the Ethereum community is formidably open, risk-taking and amongst the most welcoming crowds ever. I raised $20,000 in a mere 100 hours, and my token $ALEX was born. It was the first ever Ethereum personal token sale.

Since then I’ve tried other experiments, like a monthly newsletter, a private Telegram group, a voting system to let people choose my daily habit, a liquidity mining experiment and a partnership with another social token, all involving $ALEX in some ways.