Larry Cermak - VP Research, The Block Ep #50

<p>Anatoly (00:09):</p><p>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.</p><p>Larry Cermak (00:18):</p><p>Nice to be on, it's a pleasure.</p><p>Anatoly (00:20):</p><p>Yeah, so tell me your origin story. How'd you get into crypto?</p><p>Larry Cermak (00:24):</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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