By Jamie Redman,
Charlie Shrem, a well-known individual in the cryptocurrency space, recently returned to the industry after a year-long hiatus. Shrem has partnered with entrepreneur Jason Granger to create Intellisys Capital LLC, and Mainstreet Investment LP. The companies will manage a securities investment fund built on top of the Ethereum blockchain based on real world assets like real estate, as well as bitcoin and blockchain businesses.
Bitcoin.com chatted with the Mainstreet CTO Charlie Shrem about the new investment fund and his overall opinion of the current cryptocurrency environment. The former Bitinstant founder has a lot of experience within the digital asset realm with Bitinstant being one of the largest bitcoin brokerage services from 2011-2013. Shrem is excited to get back into the crypto-industry and gives our readers the nitty gritty in regards to his new investment fund project.
Charlie Shrem & Mainstreet Investment
Bitcoin (BC): How have you been and how does it feel jumping back into the cryptocurrency space?
Charlie Shrem (CS): It feels awesome coming back into the space. I spent a lot of time in the past year getting back in touch with people and learning about what I missed. I wanted to do something different than what everyone else was doing.
When Jason approached me with the idea of creating physical assets on the blockchain, I knew this was it.
BC: Can you tell our readers about your latest project the Mainstreet.ky Investment fund?
CS: We’ve developed a pipeline of companies that we will be purchasing. The first one is a sanitary waste business that Jason has personally vetted and met the ownership. That company purchase has been negotiated, and we’re excited to close the deal.
BC: How did you get involved with this securities fund?
CS: When we had the idea to do this, we did not want to try and find a loophole why we are not a securities firm. We wanted to do this the right way and provide a real utility to the blockchain.
Tokenizing an asset is an amazing idea that people have tried to do for a long time in the space.
BC: How is Intellisys involved with the Mainstreet.ky project?
CS: Unlike the DAO, where anyone can be a fund manager, Intellisys Capital is the fund manager. We have an experienced, dedicated team that has experience in private equity and fund management.
BC: The project uses Ethereum smart contracts can you explain to our readers what this entails? Will the MIT token be on the public Ethereum blockchain?
CS: The Mainstreet Token, MIT is an ERC20 standard token on Ethereum. It involves creating 50M tokens, selling them as ownership in Mainstreet LP and whatever we don’t sell, gets burned and taken out of circulation. The token represents real ownership in a portfolio of companies.
Investment In Real Assets and Blockchain Businesses
BC: Investments will go towards private equity and blockchain/bitcoin companies correct?
CS: Yes.
BC: Why the choice of only 30% investment into blockchain/bitcoin businesses?
CS: Unfortunately, there are not many long-term, stable middle market, profitable blockchain companies yet. We want to provide distributions to our token holders. However, our Blockchain Synergy plan involves joint venture and acquiring Bitcoin companies that can provide a product or service to our portfolio companies.
BC: What’s your opinion of the cryptocurrency and bitcoin environment currently?
CS: It’s amazing! Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.
BC: After the initial token sale when will investors be granted access to the investment dashboard?
CS: Yes, we will have an internal investment dashboard that will include community forums, and financial statements audited by a Big 4 accounting firm.
BC: What’s the overall goal of Mainstreet.ky’s investment fund?
CS: The mission of Mainstreet LP is to provide global investors a transparent, efficient and liquid vehicle to invest in stable middle market American companies. We achieve this by tokenizing the asset on the Ethereum blockchain.