Validated

Larry Cermak joined The Block as one of the first employees with the mission to provide professionals with accurate information about crypto. He now leads a 30-person research team that delivers insights to institutional customers.

00:09 - Intro

00:20 - Larry Cermak’s origin story / His work at The Block

08:25 - The fundamentals of Bitcoin

16:03 - The value of SushiSwap

19:35 - Investing based on Memes

23:42 - Market Value for future gains in Crypto

26:12 - Will NFTs be backing internet money?

28:44 - Thoughts on Algorithmic Stablecoins

31:00 - Regulation in the US

34:47 - Decentralization and tokens in the context of regulation

39:45 - Volume of users / social networks

DISCLAIMER

The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

Anatoly (00:09):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Larry Cermak, who's the VP of Research at The Block. Awesome to have you, man.

Larry Cermak (00:18):

Nice to be on, it's a pleasure.

Anatoly (00:20):

Yeah, so tell me your origin story. How'd you get into crypto?

Larry Cermak (00:24):

Yeah, it's probably slightly longer. But really high-level, I got involved in late 2016, I was in college in the US and was thinking about what to do my thesis on and Bitcoin seemed like one of the more obvious options, to not make it incredibly boring, so I just decided to go with that. And throughout the research process, I just kind of found that there isn't good research about Bitcoin, just in general crypto. There was either the super bullish people that were like all in on Bitcoin, or super bearish academics, and there nothing in between, and I felt like I can fill the gap a little bit.

So after I published that research, I shared it publicly as well with a few people, and based on that I got my first job offer to work at Diar which is a research company, focusing only on crypto. So I worked there for a couple of years, and really just tried to focus on data driven research, which now it sounds kind of obvious, but back then it just wasn't very common. Most people were just looking at the really simple metrics and munging data, but mostly it was just price discussion, price predictions, all that stuff. And we were really looking at just analyzing the market a little bit more fundamentally, that sounds even more silly now looking back.

And I got lucky that in 2017 when I joined full time, like early 2017 I joined full time, and that's when everything popped off massively, and it was just a bunch of shit ICOs, like a lot of sketchy stuff. I consciously started looking more into these projects, so I was one of the people that were kind of cautioning against some of the ICO stuff, and it was a lot of fun but I was quite skeptical back then still. So actually, a lot of people who have followed me for a while, they know initially I was a no-coiner, I had no crypto, and I was convinced that initially actually that a lot of this is just kind of hype mania, it's just all like overblown massively. But something really drew me into it, and it was mostly the permissionless nature, ability for anyone to participate, but what really I didn't like was just the hype around it, the marketing, the emptiness, and all that stuff.

So I over-focused on that I think initially, but after some time, I realized that that's probably not what this is all about. Initially, I didn't think that it was necessarily important for most projects to have tokens and I was very skeptical that most tokens need a project, and I started massively changing my mind on this with the DeFi beginnings. So early 2020 my mind started completely changing on most of the space and I stared allocating a little bit more, and now I also do seed investing privately. And obviously, I lead the research department at The Block which is now 25 researches, probably the largest research team in crypto.

Anatoly (03:33):

So you went from Bitcoin skeptic to full shit-coiner.

Larry Cermak (03:38):

Kind of, yeah. It's a little bit concerning honestly.

Anatoly (03:42):

In four years....

Tommy and Taylor are the founders of PsyOptions, a DAO developing the leading options primitives on Solana.

00:09 - Introduction and Origin Story

04:04 - What are the challenges / improvements in Solana?

11:49 - Integration of Serum v3

14:32 - ​​Adoption of PsyOptions

17:19 - Architecting the system

22:11 - Liquidity mining vs. options trading

26:27 - Background in trading options

28:05 - DeFi vs. Traditional finance products

30:56 - Gaming as a market

32:56 - Exciting things out of the hackathon

34:09 - Announcements for PsyOptions

37:53 - If Solana could change one thing?

DISCLAIMER

The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

Anatoly (00:09):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have with me Tommy and Taylor, co-founders of the PsyOptions protocol. Awesome to have you guys.

Tommy (00:18):

Thanks for having us.

Taylor (00:19):

Thanks for having us.

Anatoly (00:21):

Cool. So what's the origin story? How did you guys get into crypto and what made you build PsyOptions?

Tommy (00:27):

Crypto, it goes back to... I remember watching the Ethereum ICO, just being a broke college student, but felt we were too broke to actually throw anything into and that's a big regret, but that shaped up how we got into Solana later on. Really dove deep into everything back in 2017, right before the summer hype. And then in the summer hype, tried developing a little bit on Ethereum, doing some solidity development in the spare time, but I never jumped full time into it until PsyOptions. Taylor has a little bit of a different history with crypto.

Taylor (01:03):

Yeah. I've actually been full-time in crypto since late 2017, after Tommy and I shut down a previous business we started in school. We were looking for different things to do and I knew crypto had a lot of hype in 2017. I was like, "All right, this is definitely an industry I could see myself being a part of." I eventually took a job at Blockfolio and then as well as doing some freelance solidity development and then been full-time ever since.

Anatoly (01:27):

How did you guys meet? What was the genesis for you guys to go build PsyOptions?

Tommy (01:32):

Well, Taylor and I are twins, so we met a long, long time ago. We've always been hacking on ideas and stuff. And I guess, Taylor had his eye on Solana from 2018, right Taylor?

Taylor (01:47):

Yeah, pretty early on. I remember Multicoin writing about it. I was like, "Oh, this is actually a really sweet architecture, solves a lot of problems that we saw in Ethereum." And kept following before Mainnet beta was launched.

Tommy (01:59):

Yeah. And so we had been tinkering around, created a GitHub organization last summer, like the same one we're using now and just started reading the documentation. And then had a few projects we tried in the fall that never really took off. And then in October we were surfing with Tristan from FTX and he was just talking about Serum and everything that they were working on. So we knew what was in the pipeline and had that in the back of our mind. We did the first hackathon, did in place, built a trusted third party Oracle. And then after that had an issue with TradFi, trying to get API access to automate a options trading strategy, and that was what kicked it off. We were for fresh off that first hackathon, wanted a fresh idea, had our feet wet in Solana. And it was like, "Taylor, what if we just built options into the blockchain? We can get this API access built in. We have the order book already there, there's some basic infrastructure." And that was the genesis.

Anatoly (02:59):

That's awesome. Limited access to data was one of the reasons I started building this thing. Because I used to try to build stupid deep learning models on interactive brokers and you never have access to data. It's always even the quality is really suspects. It's like, "Do I really know that this is where things got executed? Or did they just copy and paste stuff from a database with a bunch of errors?"<...

Jonathan "Moshe" Schemoul is the founder of aleph.im, a cross-chain p2p storage, computing network and first decentralized indexing provider for Solana.

00:36 – Intro & how did Jonathan Schemoul got in crypto

02:09 – What is Aleph and how does it work?

06:48 – Is Aleph database a blockchain?

09:20 – Understanding core nodes and Aleph’s economics

11:22 – How does Aleph interact with DNS?

15:29 – How does Aleph get verification of certificates?

21:44 – How does Aleph check integrity of computation?

25:06 – What is Aleph’s vision?

30:32 – Will Aleph always be project facing or will it one day be user facing?

32:28 – What load can Aleph currently handle?

39:00 – How do the economics work for people providing hardware and bandwidth?

DISCLAIMER

The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:12):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Jonathan Schemoul with me, who's the founder of the Aleph.im project. Really awesome to have you.

Jonathan Schemoul (00:22):

Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here today.

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:25):

Cool. We usually start these with a simple question, how did you get into crypto? What's your story? What's the origin story?

Jonathan Schemoul (00:36):

Well, into crypto it's a long story. I started way back in time, a bit on Bitcoin then I stopped because it was only money back then. And that wasn't the end game for me. Then I came back into crypto in 2015, 2016, and I started doing a bit of development because I saw that I really wanted to be part of Web 3, to do nice things with it. I started developing as an open-source developer for a few projects. One of these is the newest project which is Chinese blockchain layer one. I'm not really involved with it anymore.

Jonathan Schemoul (01:16):

But working with them as a community open source developer, I saw that there was some missing links somewhere that you couldn't decentralize all the stack with just layer one, it is not the one that they were building back then. So that's how the Aleph.im project is born. For me, besides that, I've been developing for a lot of companies before in the IOT space and also for big banks sometime ago. I've been a developer for a lot of years.

Anatoly Yakovenko (01:48):

That's great. I mean, that's a great background. The thing that you're focusing on with Aleph is this idea that Web 3 is just a small part of the piece, but you still need UI front-ends, business logic and things sitting on top of the blockchain. How does that work?

Jonathan Schemoul (02:09):

The idea is that, okay, now you can have smart contracts on Solana, that's great. You can even do way much more on like just money on smart contracts, that's great. Now, you need to have a front-end. So you need to have storage for that front-end. That's not all because a smart contract, a program doesn't have all the data that you need. So you will need some kind of indexing to get history. You will need a back-end for that.

Jonathan Schemoul (02:37):

Most of the DeFi application that we see have some centralized back-end behind them. They're running on AWS, sometimes on dedicated servers or stuff like that that is still centralized. If a government, and we just saw something about it today, wants to shut down the DeFi protocol that is organized like that, they can. With Aleph.im what we are trying to do is decentralize the last mile, because for that last mile most projects are using AWS, so we need to decentralize AWS.

Jonathan Schemoul (03:11):

So we provide storage, as in file storage for the front-end files, database storage, because most applications are just databases and also an equivalent to Amazon Lambda, where you start small functions that will be launched on a decentralized cloud, where there is place for them and will get you a return value, and these can be written in any language and connects the web and also a PC from blockchains here at Solana obviously.

Anatoly Yakovenko (03:42):

Got it. Super Cool. S...

Yutaro Mori & Grace Kwan are the Co-Founders of Orca, a user-friendly cryptocurrency exchange built on Solana.

01:15 – About Orca and its vision

09:48 – What’s the future of DeFi?

20:48 – A little bit about Orca’s roadmap

25:50 – What does Orca’s team look like?

32:11 – The internet hasn’t changed much, people grew into it. How will crypto grow more present in our life?

36:22 – Solana and zero knowledge proof

40:02 – Orca’s next features planned for Q2 and Q3

43:46 – How does Orca plan on growing their worldwide community?

DISCLAIMER

The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

George Harrap is the co-founder of Step Finance, a platform for Solana DeFi users to track their portfolio performance. Before Step, George was the CEO of Bitspark.

00:29 About George Harrap and mining

05:03 From Bitcoin to DeFi, how can crypto solve currency issues in the world

18:27 STEP Finance’s vision for the next five years

21:20 Censorship resistance and layer 1s

27:11 Hackathon: what would you like to see created?

30:30 Thoughts on Rust and why it was the better choice for Solana

38:08 Why you can’t innovate in the traditional financial system

DISCLAIMER

The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.