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

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.

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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