How We Turned 52 Million Crypto Tokens Into 3,000 Winners

What we talked about.

In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, Sunny speaks with Jessica Ellerm, co-founder of Stemelia, a custom indexing platform built to help investors navigate the more than 52 million cryptocurrencies now in the market. Jessica shares her journey from a childhood dream of becoming an orchestra conductor in New Zealand to studying at the University of Sydney, working in climate consulting, and spending seven years at fintech pioneer Tyro Payments in Australia. She discusses how writing publicly about fintech led to co-founding Zuper, a superannuation startup later acquired in 2019, and how that experience shaped her move into crypto with her partner and co-founder Kent. Jessica explains how Stemelia filters the vast token universe down to around 3,000 investable assets using market cap and volume thresholds plus more than 40 customizable filters, and how the platform's new house index aims to make crypto investing more structured and accessible for newcomers. The conversation covers building complementary founder partnerships, bootstrapping versus venture funding, and why dynamic indexing is essential in a market that moves faster than traditional finance.

A fintech veteran explains how she built a tool to filter 52 million crypto tokens down to 3,000 investable winners.

The questions, and the answers.

Can you give a high-level overview of what Stemelia does?

Stemelia is a custom indexing platform for cryptocurrencies. There are over 52 million tokens in the market, and researching all of them to figure out what to invest in would take another 24 hours in the day. We built a way to filter the market down quickly into powerful, high performing baskets of tokens so people can get crypto exposure without all the extra work needed to get a good return.

What did the kid version of Jessica want to be when she grew up?

I probably thought I was going to be an orchestra conductor. I played violin, viola, and piano and really wanted to conduct. I think that taught me about coordination and teamwork, since playing in an ensemble isn't about you individually. I loved playing in the team version of music, and that transferred directly into how I think about building companies.

What made you say yes to Tyro Payments, a fintech startup, back in 2009?

Honestly, it's a bit cliche, but I just thought they had cool offices. I remember interviewing at all these places as a grad and being surprised by what office life was like. Tyro's office was open plan, wooden floors, exposed brick, the classic startup vibe. I had no real idea what merchant acquiring payments even was, but I thought these seemed like cool people, so I jumped in.

What did working across sales, BD, marketing, and product teach you that staying in one lane couldn't have?

Sales is the best grounding for a career in business. You learn to build relationships, hustle, and pick up the phone to convince someone you don't know about something while understanding their pain points. When you move from sales into product or go-to-market roles, you bring a deep understanding of the customer with you, which is much harder to develop if you haven't come from that background.

Superannuation in 2017 reminded you of payments in 2007. What did the incumbents miss?

It was really about digital transformation, which hadn't happened in superannuation at all at the time, or only happened poorly around the fringes. It was a quasi government instituted program that got customers through legislative arrangements, so it didn't need to fight to keep them. There were real parallels to payments incumbents who just had to be given what the banks allowed.

What let you see past the noise and scams that keep traditional finance people away from crypto?

I have a strong desire for structure and order, and this space feels chaotic to a lot of people, which keeps them out. I thought, what if you could bring more structure to this space and give people a clean framework to start with? At Zuper we built superannuation portfolios using index funds and ETFs, and I realized that structure wasn't really possible in crypto yet.

How do you and your co-founder Kent's operating styles combine, and where do you argue?

Kent is the deep analytical mind, very mathematical, and he built our index methodology and the indexing infrastructure, along with running our engineering team of about four devs. I sit more at the front of house, talking to the market, thinking about distribution strategy and messaging. We're complementary, we drop into each other's domains and problem solve together.

With 52 million tokens out there and most going to zero, how does Stemelia filter for the ones with staying power?

We whittle 52 million down to just over 3,000 by applying a global filter for a minimum market cap of a million dollars and minimum daily traded volume of 100,000. From there we offer over 40 filters that combine in infinite ways, so you can narrow down to something like AI agent tokens on Solana with specific market cap and volume criteria, then chart and compare that index against others.