LunarCRUSH: Your definitive source for cryptocurrency community insights

Active Twitter users may have noticed @lunarcrush, an account trending on many of the popular VeChain feeds. LunarCRUSH compiles data from social media platforms, markets, and other community sites to create a real-time scoring indices. Showing which cryptocurrencies are being talked about is a potentially valuable metric for investors and projects trying to gauge demand. Ben Yorke sat down with Joe Vezzani, the founder and CEO of LunarCRUSH, to learn more…

BY: Thanks for joining us! How’s 2020 treating you so far?

JV: Wonderful. We started 2020 in the crypto-space with a major market rally. Even though I do not believe Bitcoin and crypto are perfect in their negative correlation – we have seen yet again an example when there is global unrest, the crypto markets rally. The main word to focus on is global. Cryptocurrency is extremely global and when investors think about this market, they have to be focused internationally. Personally at LunarCRUSH, we see well over 50% of our users come from outside the US.

BY: Interesting, that’s similar to VeChain, where many of our community come from Europe, Asia, and Australia. But anyways, let’s get started. I’m going to throw a few questions at you: How do you see users benefitting from LunarCRUSH? Can you shed some light on how the platform should be used? Who are the ideal users?

JV: I will start with the last question. Our ideal user is anyone who wants to learn more about how cryptocurrencies create value, and what makes them valuable. Right now for most of the retail market, cryptocurrencies are speculative investments. And everyday they become less speculative and move more into an established investment.

What we have identified at LunarCRUSH, is that unlike traditional stock markets, cryptocurrencies move more based on social supply and demand. We like to say, without a community, there is no crypto. We believe all cryptocurrency investors, new and old, should be focused on looking at the project’s community, and how it’s grown or shrunk over time. It’s an indicator you cannot ignore.

With that, a great place to start learning is to sign-up for LunarCRUSH and keep track of how social volume is trending over time. Social volume is the make-up of every unique metric across social media. Basically a unique volume of mentions across sites like Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Youtube. Places where the conversations are happening. Below is an example of what you can see on the platform:

Price vs. Social Volume – 3 Month Chart for VeChain

BY: Time to drop some knowledge on us. What industry insights have you been observing recently? How could we interpret this?
JV: I will pick on Bitcoin a little for this one since it is the broadest of the coins with regards to market interest and knowledge. For those of us heavy in the industry, you need to get out and talk to people who are far away from the industry. Many people still only know Bitcoin and nothing else.

One thing we are seeing is an increase in retail interest. With the run up in the first half of 2019, we did not see the same level of retail interest. When the price of Bitcoin was hitting $12,000 at the beginning of August, mentions were maxing out at roughly 50,000/day. Today, as we speak, the daily mentions for Bitcoin has risen to above 80,000/day, and the price is about 30% less than we were in August. This indicates that retail investors are starting to gain interest again, and that’s a good thing for the crypto-space as a whole.

BY: Seeing as we are a VeChain community, are there any trends or insights you can share about the VET ranking? 
JV: We have truly enjoyed interacting and getting to know a lot of the veChain community. What a great group of passionate and engaged individuals working together as one.

In order to help investors access how a project is fairing against the rest of the market from a price and community perspective, we created the LunarCRUSH ALTRank™. The ALTRank™ combines price performance and social metrics to give investors an integrated look at how a project has grown and held value over time.

VeChain has not fallen out of the top 200 ALTRank™ since we developed the metric in 2019. We have another motto, “Not all Alt Coin’s are created equal.” And it is the reason we created the ranking. We wanted to understand how a coin’s community affected the value of the project. So far we have found the two to be highly correlated.

VeChain  ALTRank™ over the last 3 months, never above 200

VeChain ALTRank™ over the last 7 days, never above 125

BY: How did you get into this industry? What made you decide to turn this into a website? Judging from the professional look of the platform, you’ve clearly done this kind of thing before…
JV: Like anyone else who learned about cryptocurrency in what I like to call Phase II, 2013-2017, the technology was the perfect intersection between software and finance or technology and money. By solving the double-spend problem it made a new world possible. And if that does not fire you up, I don’t know what will.

I started my career in finance but moved away very quickly as I entered the market here in the US when the market was crashing. I always like to share the screenshot I took at my first job.

Largest 1 day run up in US Stock Market History
Source: https://twitter.com/joevezz/status/1203166768019070976?s=20

The day the bailout happened, I knew the system was broken. We had no choice at the time, which is actually a reinforcement for it’s brokenness.

I did not know how the market crash would affect my decisions later in life, but have always been curious during my career. Asking too many questions, challenging the “we did it like that last time” way of thinking. I felt it was important to gain experience in different sectors, working completely different jobs the entire way.

I’ve helped build a couple major pieces of software within the start-up space and for the Fortune 500 and gained insight along the way.

Even with my finance background, my true calling was always within software. It stemmed from gaming as a child. When playing the original Rainbow 6, if you wanted to be any good, you had to learn to speed up your CPU and create the lowest latency possible, even when you did not have all the tools. You had to be scrappy. There was teamwork involved and everyone was in a different place. It was fast and you had to make quick decisions. I honestly give my early gaming days the most credit when it comes to working in today’s decentralized marketplace.

As you transition those skills to the workforce, it’s important to learn how things are done differently, and why they may work in some cases and not in others. When you have a massive corporation, most of it is setup to protect the billions of dollars in sales and the nitch in the market. They are not setup to grow, innovate, and expand. That is okay though, our world does need economies of scale and big businesses. You cannot fly to the moon without them.

I have always worked well in a smaller and more nimble setting where I can connect with my team 1 on 1. Inspiration, creativity and big ideas come from small ultra-passionate groups of people who have learned to calm and control their ego.

When starting LunarCRUSH, that is exactly what we had. We wanted to solve a problem no one else was solving correctly. We had a small passionate group focused on customer experience and design. We believe we can bring transparency and confidence to the market.

Truly appreciate you having me. Thank you.

For more info, check out: https://lunarcrush.com

Joe Vezzani, Founder @ LunarCRUSH

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VeChain’s Low Carbon Ecosystem Awarded in China for Charity Work

VeChain’s Low Carbon Ecosystem is a WeChat Mini-App that rewards users for engaging in eco-friendly activities, such as walking or driving BYD’s line of electric vehicles. We introduced it a few months ago in this article.

January 9th – Chinese media portal ODaily (由星球日报) held their 2019 Blockchain Awards Ceremony. DNV GL and VeChain’s Low Carbon Ecosystem was the recipient of the award for the best “Blockchain Charity Event”, in recognition of their work in the previous year.

2019 “Finance and Technology” Blockchain Award for Best Charity Event

Last September, the Low Carbon Ecosystem partnered with Shanghai People’s Broadcasting Station (News 990) and multiple other municipal bureaus to bring school uniforms and supplies to rural areas of China. Local primary and middle schools throughout Shanghai donated the supplies, while donations through VeChain’s Low Carbon Mini-App went to cover the cost of shipping, transportation, and other logistical expenses.

Announced late in 2018, VeChain’s Low Carbon Ecosystem (DiTanHui in Chinese) has had a slow but methodical growth from concept to reality. Hindered by regulations on cryptocurrencies, VeChain is taking a conservative stance – one that can encourage large partners such as BYD and Renji Hospital to feel comfortable in this innovative new initiative. They are focusing on the transparency that blockchain can bring to charitable programs, especially for enterprises or NGOs. It appears VeChain is taking a measured approach based on bringing in more partners before trying to push the project to the mass consumers.

Users can earn points on a daily basis, and use those to either donate to charitable programs or put towards discounts in the Low Carbon Shop – a marketplace that is slowly adding products to attract new users.

While the project is still at a very early stage, progress is evident and the direction they are taking shows a logical decision to focus on growth and compliance in China. Blockchain-assisted poverty alleviation is a use case consistently mentioned by China’s government, giving VeChain and DNV GL an ethically and politically-sound platform to attract new partners – a move that should ensure the long-term success of the initiative. Recognition from media groups like ODaily is further confirmation that VeChain’s Low Carbon Ecosystem is on the right track.

For information on the San Marino-based Low Carbon Ecosystem, click here.

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Buy luxury real estate with VET: Jur delivers first Secure Commercial Agreements for blockchain purchases

We often forget that in addition to producing VTHO and securing the network, VET has another major use: A digital currency. And while we’ve yet to really see people swapping VET for everyday goods, the reach of the VeChain ecosystem is constantly expanding, making that scenario more and more plausible.

This time, ecosystem partner Jur stole the spotlight, building secure commercial agreements that facilitate the flow of currency and procedures to purchase “off the plan” real estate. This allows property developers and construction companies to sell real estate in exchange for cryptocurrency, in a simplified, secure, and compliant manner.

What is buying off the plan?
Buying off the plan is when you sign a contract to buy an apartment that is yet to be built. Without a physical property to inspect, buyers base their decision on plans and artistic renderings of how the apartment might look, in addition to information about the project and developer.

Source: realestate.com.au

Dream Tower – Limassol

These properties aren’t going cheap, either. Located right off the beach in Limassol, Cyprus, these 55 luxury apartments are decked out with a VIP gourmet restaurant, roof-top residents lounge, business center, sparkling fresh water swimming pools and sun deck, world-class spa and sauna, fully-equipped fitness center and outdoor tennis courts. A simple one bedroom apartment is starting at just under €700K, while a 4 bedroom duplex is closer to €7 million.

Artist rendering of the Dream Tower in Cyprus

Convincing potential buyers to use VET might not be easy, but as an added incentive, the sellers are offering a 5% discount for those that do. That is quite substantial when you consider the high cost of one of these seaside flats.

Jur is going to play an important role in developing a complete legal vertical on VeChain’s infrastructure. These secure commercial agreements (SCAs) will automate a number of large professional applications, such as the real estate scenario we’ve seen here. This isn’t as easy as it sounds – Jur had to do a ton of work ensuring that the development company had the correct procedure to legally accommodate overseas buyers. It’s worth noting that in Cyprus and other areas receiving a high level of tourist traffic, overseas buyers make up a large percentage of overall purchases. The result is that Jur’s automated solution can save a lot of time, and give developers a lot more options, expanding the potential market on the international stage. With that in mind, it’s safe to suggest that the SCAs won’t end when the final Dream Tower property is sold – this can be replicated all over the globe.

Artist rendering of inside a Dream Tower apartment

And while the JUR token isn’t the primary focus of the exchange, law firms interested in working with Jur on SCAs and commercial standards will need to be a Jur Status holder – a hybrid staking model that was announced at the OceanEx Meetup in Europe last year. We are expecting an updated announcement on that early in Q1 of 2020, so stay tuned for that. These SCA deals can be extremely lucrative for law firms, and as a a first-mover in the blockchain legaltech space, Jur is in a good position to garner an abundance of professional interest.

Regardless of the outcome, this is another remarkable feat for the VeChain ecosystem, as they continue to knock down barriers into uncharted commercial use cases. With capable partners like Jur building alongside – 2020 is promising to be an eye-opening year for the entire ecosystem.

Read more: Jur Official Medium

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Insights on Baidu’s New Xuper-Hyped Blockchain Platform

Baidu made headlines briefly during the week with the announcement of their new blockchain platform – named Xuperchain (Superchain, in Chinese). Baidu, China’s most dominant search engine, comes in at #50 on Forbes’ Top 100 Digital Company Ranking and boasts close to 200 million daily active users, despite their recent struggles. They follow a string of high-profile companies launching blockchain platforms, including Tencent, JD.com, and Facebook.

The Xuperchain website displayed some impressive stats, including the fact that since being open-sourced in the Spring of 2018, it has had 3.5 million users and 450 million transactions. It listed having multiple consensus algorithms, led by Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) and smart contracts written in either Solidity or Go. It also boasted of having main chains, parallel chains, side chains, and DAG capabilities with a max TPS of 20,000 transactions per second. What’s not to like?

Too good to be true?

And while the well-researched Redditors on r/Neo were commiserating the impending doom of public blockchain projects in China, we were left wondering what the actual impact of this announcement was? Considering this is a company whose stock price is over 50% down from its peak of $284 in May of 2018, there were many question marks surrounding the announcement. Speaking with three blockchain experts in China, we gained some valuable insights.

One smart contract developer working in Beijing noted that this “announcement” was par for the course considering China’s recent heavy approach to blockchain technology. He reminded us that companies like Alibaba, Huawei, and many others were scrambling over themselves to announce blockchain platforms in the wake of President Xi’s big announcement back in October. This isn’t a phenomenon unique to blockchain – it happens with AI, 5G, and every other emerging technology that shows promise. And while these companies have incredible amounts of resources at their disposal, they lack the focus and priority that a smaller, more agile company might possess.

A second expert, heavily involved in the Shanghai blockchain scene, was even more unimpressed. He hadn’t even taken the time to pay close attention to the announcement, seeing as how every large existing tech company in China had registered a blockchain-as-a-service platform, with little real world adoption to show for it. He suggested that the media fanfare that accompanied this was due to some high-profile media sources picking up the story, likely in an attempt to further impress pro-blockchain leadership.

A third and final expert, also a blockchain developer, was more complimentary of the progress the tech team had made when scrutinizing the documentation. In particular, he credited the team for improving the UTXO and database protocols that helped to speed up the blockchain. Still, announcing a blockchain project has never been the hard part, as evident from the estimated 32,000 registered Chinese companies using the word “blockchain” according to a CCTV report in November of 2019.

Unrealistic Goals for China’s Tech Giants

So what can we make of all this? Certainly, Baidu could pose a competitive threat to companies like VeChain in China, where Baidu’s influence and name recognition allow them to target top developers and big name partners. But in reality, these tech giants rarely miss an opportunity to make a headline: Let’s not forget Baidu going full-force at a number of new industries, including the short-lived Baidu Smartphone, the Baidu Apollo Smart Car (now facing massive losses and lay-offs at factories), and every other flavor of the week industry that they hurled themselves into. Technode estimates they lost RMB 2.3 billion on smart speakers alone. Without being too critical, Baidu will continue to excel at its core offerings, and will make some unexpected inroads into new markets, but will lack the finesse and understanding to penetrate technical areas such as the public blockchain space.

In many ways, their recognizable branding should continue the growth of blockchain adoption in China, bringing more exposure to the technology. It should serve as nothing more than a subtle reminder that for projects like VeChain, time is of the essence, a fact that CEOs like Sunny Lu is already 100% aware of.

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Cointelegraph Consulting Aims to Drive VeChain Deeper into the Business World

In December, VeChain and Cointelegraph Consulting announced they were partnering to bring blockchain solutions to enterprises, governments, and institutions interested in adopting innovative blockchain solutions. Cointelegraph Consulting was formed late in 2019 as they recognized the pro-blockchain stance many companies and governments were starting to take. Having acquired years of expertise reporting on blockchain companies, they were in a good position to provide guidance to organizations needing secure and effective implementations.

Cointelegraph Consulting works by selecting a few high-quality blockchains to become vendors. As the leading enterprise blockchain platform, VeChain was a natural choice to be included as a vendor, using established solutions such as MyStory and ToolChain to help fulfill the needs of potential clients. After meetings held in Singapore shortly following the Fintech Festival and Blockshow Asia, the two companies were able to reach an agreement.

For 2020, Cointelegraph Consulting will begin leveraging their network of professional organizations with the goal of connecting VeChain to potential clients, while authoring institutional-grade research reports and analytics. The consulting team consists of researchers and professionals with corporate experience at some of the top global firms, including Accenture and McKinsey. This will help with Cointelegraph Consulting’s goal of educating enterprises on the benefits of public blockchains, as more and more corporations shift away from expensive private chains and traditional data storage methods.

For a blockchain project like VeChain, having reputable partners is a major difference maker. Last summer, it was through PwC that VeChain was able to land a partnership with Walmart China. DNV GL has connected countless clients to VeChain, and are able to vouch for and certify the quality of VeChain’s solutions. Now by adding Cointelegraph Consulting to the list that already includes top firms like PwC and Deloitte, VeChain can focus more on development of core solutions and spend less time on business development.

“VeChain and Cointelegraph Consulting will co-brand and co-produce industry reports on enterprise blockchain adoption. Cointelegraph Consulting  will organize enterprise level events globally for technology partners, which VeChain will leverage for maximum exposure. VeChain will also be listed on Cointelegraph’s solution provider page with detailed descriptions of VeChain’s intro, tech and use cases which will provide VeChain potential enterprise engagement leads. Cointelegraph Consulting will directly recommend their enterprise clients and partners to use and integrate VeChain’s enterprise blockchain solutions as they see fit to leverage the full potential of the VeChainThor public blockchain.”

VeChain Foundation Medium Article

Cointelegraph Consulting’s Managing Director Arsenii Dain noted the potential of public blockchain solutions for enterprises was frustrated by the lack of collaboration between service providers and those willing to embrace blockchain for business. Much of this comes down to the absence of trust in blockchain startups, as enterprises are reluctant to trust something they are unfamiliar with. Cointelegraph can bridge this trust gap by providing unbiased reporting and solutions, without making hollow sales pitches. As of now, Cointelegraph Consulting has already set the wheels in motion as they began preparing reports and solutions, aiming to make 2020 a major year for enterprise adoption.

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NFTs, Art, and Collectible Games, How one project exceeded expectations in 2019

A reflection on the year’s events from Jamie Thomson, CEO & Founder of VeriArti. VeriArti has quickly become one of the most impressive community-founded projects, grabbing headlines with their NFT creation suite for blockchain artwork and games like The Way of the Tiger.

VeriArti was a full year of development spurred on with motivation from the supportive community and a desire to not only create a dApp we’re passionate about, but to utilise the many benefits of the VeChainThor blockchain in the process.

Starting at the developer summit in San Francisco (Late Spring) we had only produced an MVP of what will now actually be a sub-product of VeriArti – STAMP. STAMP was a platform where users could upload their work, have it encrypted using a SHA-256 algorithm, and unlock it with their private keys in order to prove ownership via blockchain if copyright infringement ever took place. This of course took advantage of VeChain’s fee delegation allowing users to implement this function without every having to buy or hold cryptocurrency.However, before long we discovered the enormous market of NFT collectibles and then gaming, and thus the scope of VeriArti shot up exponentially, and of course, development. We aimed to target the NFT digital art market, but not in a themed or ‘fun’ way, but for serious artists wanting to add rarity to their work. That is still the major function of VeriArti, but as we started developing a flexible API which allowed a variety of functions to interact with the blockchain, all without the need for crypto, we started to allow room for collectibles and games.

In no particular order, here are the milestones achieved for VeriArti in 2019:

  • Nominated for the 2019 VeChain Dev Summit Community Award
  • Attended Web Summit in Lisbon to talk about the benefits of fee delegation
  • Signing of Block Babies – a world of collectible ‘fighting’ babies
  • Signing of The Way of the Tiger – a fantasy card-collectible game with vast ambition and strong team
  • Signing of Anime Chain – A Japanese based digital art team aimed at anime collectibles
  • 800 members registering, with over 300 active on the dapp.
  • Several professionsl artists joining our community
  • Partnered with Truilioo, the leading KYC provider, in order to offer ‘verified artist’ tags
  • Launched affiliate system so members can benefit from onboarding others
  • The first of the VeTeam cards released

The dApp itself released in the following order:

  • Alpha V.1 – Community functions open, including messaging, activity, profiles, leaderboards, group creation, feeds, rankings, badges, points and chat
  • Alpha V.2  – ‘Game of Owns’: to test our front end we held an off-chain mint and sell game where users could put up any work and the winners would be the most sold and highest rated. We gave out 30000 VET in prizes.
  • VRA Tokenizer V.1 – This was our first live version of being able to create an NFT without needing crypto at all. It only allowed single editions and was on testnet but worked well enough to take us to the final stage – the VRA Tokenizer

The VRA Tokenizer

Our NFT creator is genuinely the first of its kind in the NFT space. The strongest competitor that allow custom NFTs are Enjin. With a little reseach you can see that they charge $15, must hold ENJ in your wallet and wait up to a week for your NFT to be delivered. There are some ETH based sites that offer automatic minting but are in fact hosting the wallet of the NFT creator, so isn’t in fact decentralised enough to say the author owns the NFT from the beginning.

The VRA tokenizer utilises both MPP (Multi-Party Protocol/fee delegation) and MTT (Multi-Task transaction). These are both monumentally effective for us. First, it allow us to sponsor any minting (and marketplace tx) meaning a user does not need to own, buy or hold crypto in order to mint an NFT, plus it means for those making editions of a piece of work, we can bundle all the editions of a piece of art in just one transaction, saving us VTHO and time.
As of this time, we ran out of VTHO 5 hours after the tokenizer was launched, so that can only be a good thing!

Going forward

We are releasing the beta version of our marketplace in the next few days and 2020 will be a year of onboarding, improving, adding features and not only supporting the dapps we already have signed on but accepting applications for new ones. We will be upgrading STAMP with a whole suite of IP management tools as well as moving into physical art tagging.

The appeal of VeriArti to these companies it that they don’t need to make their own smart contracts. And not only that, they needn’t even bother with cryptocurrency in order to create their items. We have API routes allowing creation and retrieval of their NFTs. So all they have to do is design their game, create their art, fill in a few forms to turn their art into NFT items and then design their front-end around the game they so choose. In fact it’s so easy, a community member with a simple idea could create a dapp using VeriArti.

We also have a couple of more big announcements to make in terms of who is coming on board, but after the ‘Microsoft’ fiasco, we’re going to be choosing our timing wisely for these. Nevertheless, it’s not only an exciting year for us but we can guarantee plenty of VTHO burn for the community and hope we can stamp VeChain onto the dApp market competitor list.

In the meantime, why not try making a little collectible set on VRA now, just to see how easy it is! Creativity over skill is what we encourage!

Follow VeriArti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/veriartivra
Join the discussion on Telegram: https://t.me/VeriArti

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