Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy 0:01
Okay, today we’re talking to Jove a Zani. He is the CEO and founder of lunar crush, which is right now the app that I have the biggest crush on for the crypto world. I’m really, really excited to talk to him about that. So, welcome to the show. Joe, how are you today?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 0:18
I’m doing well. Rob, thank you so much for having me.
Rob McNealy 0:22
Well, I appreciate taking time. You know, as someone who’s been in the crypto space for a little while, I always like to see the people doing something different in the space. And the other thing that’s really interesting about what I what you’re doing here is that you kind of care about UI and UX, which seems to be the wall in the crypto sphere. So before we jump in, why don’t we just go and you know, let’s learn a little bit about you. How Who are you? How’d you get into this space?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 0:51
Yeah, for sure. You know, got started pretty similarly. I feel like to a lot of other people that I hear you You know, talk about crypto is, you know, at some point, you know, someone that you know, or, you know, you kind of just run across Bitcoin. And, you know, I was at the time it was, you know, probably like late 2014, early 2015, and my now co founder, john, as he just kind of came up to me and we were working together at the time, he’s like, hey, do you know what Bitcoin is? And I was like, I don’t know. And it was like, his eyes lit up, like he got to tell someone new and learned a little bit about Bitcoin. And, you know, for me, you know, kind of coming out of school with a finance degree, worked in technology and startups before it was kind of this intersection of finance and tech that I was just like, I need to be a part of this somehow. And then, you know, started looking a little bit more at everything else, and you start to kind of go down the ladder a little bit and you’re like, you know, at the time, it was just mostly just Bitcoin. That was some other stuff. But you start to figure out like, what’s this ethereal thing and Litecoin and you start to learn a little bit more and you’re like, Wow, there. There is a lot down this rabbit hole, and I need to learn more about it. And so, at that time, we were just kind of going back and forth. And you know, we were the people that everyone was like, you know, hey, what do I buy? What’s the next hot tip? And what do I do next? And, you know, just kind of got deeper and deeper from there.
Rob McNealy 2:17
Well, I think that’s a lot how a lot of us kind of get started with this. I actually haven’t been in crypto that long. And people always like how long you been in here? Like two years, two and a half years or like, well, how long is your old your project? Two years. So we kind of just like jumped right in. But one of the things that I kind of interesting is your app. And I have been like glued to this thing, like every day, like I used to go to like coin market cap and coin Gecko and keep hitting refresh and refresh. And I don’t even go there anymore. I go to lunar crush. So let’s talk about lunar crash. What is lunar crash and why am I personally so addicted to it?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 3:01
Well, first off, thank you, that’s a huge compliment. I appreciate that. And you know that, you know, the kind of the addictiveness a little bit is is the way we kind of design this and the way we think about, you know, experience and people coming onto our site and looking at everything is we’re very focused on that design and, and getting people to understand what’s happening very easily, even for people that aren’t into the crypto space yet, but are kind of, you know, like, we’d like to say crypto curious. And they’re starting to dive in, we wanted it to be simple. And inherently the market is our market in this space is very community driven. And a lot of these projects that, you know, especially in the all coin, they’re very, it’s kind of tribal, and people out there posting and they’re talking about what’s happening in the community. And, you know, we capture that, you know, and we’re looking at across the entire market, we’re looking at things like Twitter, Reddit, any sort of news URL that’s out there any link and we’re pulling all that together, and so your You’re really feeling what’s happening in real time when you’re when you’re on our site and you’re in your understanding, not just Bitcoin but everything else and what the community is saying at this exact moment. And so it’s a really amazing kind of feeling to get out there and really kind of see the heart and the pulse of the market. And I think it’s what people have kind of been waiting for it for a while.
Rob McNealy 4:21
Well, I agree with that. And not only do you have like, you know, normal, you know, statistics about and, you know, measurements about what a coin might be doing from a price perspective and things like that. But you’re pulling in all these measurements about in metrics about what the community is saying almost like sentiment and engagement, that kind of monitoring and And to me, that’s pretty fascinating. What what what made you think to do that, no one else is doing it that I’m seeing out there. So yeah, why go there?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 4:54
Well, you know, we look at when you look at kind of the stock markets, and you look at equities, and you Look at what drives value and the prices of these of these things. It’s it’s really earnings. You know, obviously there’s speculative, you know, you can look at Tesla and what’s happening right now. And, you know, as we record this February 4 2020, it’s kind of parabolic right now, and it’s moving. And that’s, that’s speculation, and it’s, it’s about the future growth of that company. And that’s what’s driving the value. And, but when you’re looking at the broader when we’re talking stock market, its earnings. I mean, it’s literally earnings beats over time is really what pushes these stocks up over time. And that’s why those big companies are so focused on that, where crypto is, is not like that. Its supply and demand driven. What is the social discourse that’s happening? Who’s talking about it? How are the communities being grown, it’s very different. And so you know, when we’re, we wanted to look at what the community is saying we wanted to see it in real time, and we wanted to put it, you know, over time, and you kind of see it on our site as more of a graphical time series representation and so you’re really seen it One place, you know, how is how did the, you know, the tehsils community do over the last two months? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? You know, when you’re looking at maybe some projects that are a little bit smaller that are up and coming, and you get a tip from a friend and you’re like, hey, check this project out, you know, you’re going to know real fast, whether or not that’s kind of a viable project? Or is it kind of the beginning or the end of it? By looking at our site?
Rob McNealy 6:24
So how did you come up with some of these algorithms are the best guests or did you benchmark against something? Because you got some interesting, you know, analysis that you have that, you know, these algorithms that are built into it? Where did that come from?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 6:38
Which ones are you talking about specifically?
Rob McNealy 6:42
I don’t have it up in front of me now. See, now you’re catching me off guard. I’m gonna have to like look it up. Like…
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 6:48
Like, so we have a couple of proprietary metrics that we’ve designed. One’s called the galaxy score, and the other one’s called vault rank.
Rob McNealy 6:54
That’s it right there. See you called it that was the one I didn’t know the name of it. So yes, that’s The Galaxy score that was it was on the top of my, my, my tongue there.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 7:05
Yeah, we’ve got a very space themed over here. But so galaxy score I can start with first and, you know, we wanted to kind of create a metric and it’s it’s a real time metric and we’re looking at things that are coming in constantly we’re not, you know, we’re not Moody’s you know, or s&p out here and saying that, you know, it’s a by rating or, you know, it’s a, you know, from a B to A B plus, or whatever it is, and, you know, over the next couple of months, this is what’s going to happen, we, you know, crypto moves too quick for that. And so, with galaxy score, we’re looking at each individual project, and we’re looking at it’s a performance against itself over time. And so we’re looking at things like we’re doing some technical analysis and some price, you know, analysis on each project, but then we’re also incorporating that projects community and the social that has happened around that project and how quickly it’s happening. And so, galaxy score, you know, like, I like to say it’s kind of like coffee. More advanced traders only where, you know, that’s going to move pretty rapidly. And so we’ve got people like, you know, bot traders, and we’ve got, you know, professional traders and people that are using that to look in real time at what’s happening. And so it’s, you know, zero to 100 score and you know, 100 would be the best. And so it means that there’s a lot of kind of social that’s happening at that moment, along with Bryce. And then the other one is called alt rank. And so alt rank is looking at a project’s performance against the rest of the market. And so it’s ranking everything from a one to you know, I think, right now, we’ve got about 1700 that we’re looking at across the entire market. And so we’re pulling in and saying, hey, what is, you know, a theory of price versus something like Bitcoin over time? And is it beating that is it losing against that? And then what is the kind of the social that’s happening at the same time, and so when you kind of put all that in correlate it together, you really get this kind of cool understanding of the market and so at any given time, time if you’re looking at lunar crash and you go to our markets page, and you’re seeing things, you know, ranked one to 25 that means that something’s happening right now. Prices moving, socialist moving, things are happening, volume is high market volume is high. And it’s somewhere as a trader or someone that’s looking at the market, you should really be paying attention to that.
Rob McNealy 9:18
So I’m looking at the you know, I’m bias. I’m looking at the Tusk page on lunar crash. So my Galaxy score for our project went down since yesterday. It was in the 50s yesterday, which said neutral but now it’s down and it says bearish. So what did we do that went from neutral yesterday to bearish today on the galaxy’s score for task.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 9:38
I’m not looking at it right here. But, you know, my guess would be that, you know, if there was a decline in market volume, or if there was a decline in price, correlated with also some social volume that’s going down then, at least at this moment, you know, in the galaxy scores updating continuously, that it’s a little bit lower now. You know, if there’s some buys that come through at the Some social action that happens if things start to kind of move, that galaxy score is going to jump pretty quickly. And so, you know, a move from something like in the 40s to something in the 80s, per se is gonna, that should be a blip on the radar to say that something’s happening with with Tusk.
Rob McNealy 10:15
Gotcha. So and I know, we didn’t have any volume yesterday, because we’re still new, and we’re only on one exchange, and, but I’m just curious on how, you know, I’m looking at my own stuff. So, but are all drank here says we’re 864 out of 2046. So, it’s got a little trophy thing, what does that mean?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 10:33
So 864 I mean, you know, again, this is this is looking at test performance against Bitcoin. So if it’s underperforming against something like Bitcoin, and then also, you know, maybe social volume or social engagement is is lower than the alt rank is going to kind of rank there but, you know, hey, 864 to 2000 you know, you’re still better than than 50%. But, you know, if if test starts to outperform bit coin and there starts to be some social that’s happening in real time, then you would see that rank move up really quickly. And, you know, I just want to caveat that we also put we as also assign an alt rank to Bitcoin. And the way that you could kind of look at that, look at that is if Bitcoin is rallying and is the number one all coin, our alt rank and lunar garage, it means that you know, you you might want to be in Bitcoin right now, because there’s rally happening, things are moving.
Rob McNealy 11:27
So there’s another section that says about the task. It’s over on the right side where it’s about the Messari. The Messari section, sorry.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 11:39
Yep.
Rob McNealy 11:40
So with is that section, we don’t have anything there. How would I get stuff there?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 11:44
So we, you know, we’re focused at Luna crush on all the social and the real time data, and then we’re partnering and we utilize miscarries data for some of the more about section I think mizar does an amazing job of kind of aggregating kind of the you know, more long Form kind of project oriented data around the why and what’s happening. And so, you know, they we pull in some of their data to kind of showcase on our site, if people want to kind of dive more into the, you know, who are the some of the founders of the project, you know, what is the, you know, what’s the blockchain? Like? What’s the out of their algorithm? Like, how is it working? And so they’re, they’re kind of focused on that. And so we pull in the data from there to, to kind of showcase on our site because they do such a good job.
Rob McNealy 12:27
So we need to get on their radar, if we want that box filled. So it also says here that our social sentiment is 60% of 3.3%, then bullish, so that’s a good thing right? Under the alt right box.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 12:43
Social sentiment, you’re saying?
Rob McNealy 12:45
Yeah, that’s right under the alt rank box,
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 12:48
Yep. Yep. So social sentiment, anything that is, you know, probably over 50%, we start to kind of categorize as more of a bullish and so we’re looking at some of the some of the data that’s out there, and You know, we’ve actually trained our own machine learning to look at, specifically crypto language out there in the web. And so, you know, when people talk about different projects in our space, you know, they, they speak about it differently, you know, when someone says, whether they’re right or wrong, that you know, monero is going to the moon. That’s a bullish sentiment. But, you know, a traditionally trained library is not going to pick that up. And so we’ve actually gone in and as the data comes in, we’re training it and we’re looking at it specifically and kind of hand tailoring all the data to understand, you know, what is the sentiment across some of this?
Rob McNealy 13:37
So it’s not just hashtags, you’re looking at the whole key words and different terms and how they’re used in conjunction with other maybe adjectives or things like that.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 13:47
Yeah, I mean, we’re looking at you know, any news that’s out there or any, any social that’s out there, and if there’s links that are posted within that, we’re kind of going in spidering that and looking at the different articles and trying to figure out, you know, was this was this meant to be Something that was a more positive or more as more of a negative occurrence.
Rob McNealy 14:05
So where do you see this would apply to other assets? Perhaps even like So you mentioned earlier with like Tesla, it seems like it’d be really interesting now to see some of the sentiment around Tesla, because everybody seems to be phone via phone going around it right now. Do you think this would apply in the same way to traditional assets like that?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 14:26
Man, I mean, the FOMO is so high in Tesla, I don’t think you even need ludicrous to identify the sentiment on that one. But yes, I mean, in in a short answer would be that, yes, absolutely. We can take in and pull in kind of traditional asset classes and look at it, our focus has, you know, we’re passionate about the crypto space and we want it to grow and we’re very focused on it. And so our, you know, our roadmap right now, at least for the foreseeable future is focused on cryptocurrency and we want to see this space grow and we want to see the you know, the people and the projects and the company’s growing So we’re completely focused on growing and, and maintain our space here.
Rob McNealy 15:05
So how are you guys funded? How did you guys? Are you bootstrapping this? Or did you get some VC money?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 15:11
We we originally bootstrapped this thing from the beginning. You know, we were, you know, like, like anyone else you want to build something from scratch and you want it, want it to be yours, and so we bootstrapped it. We did. In 2019. We joined a tech stars program, so I’m not sure if any of your listeners know but tech stars is, you know, one of the you know, best accelerator startup accelerator.
Rob McNealy 15:36
David Cohen.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 15:37
Yep, absolutely. Yeah. So tech stars. We joined the LA program here and did that from July to October. And then we have, you know, some other some other partnerships with some local venture capitalists here in in Los Angeles. One is Draper Goran home. So they just founded new venture firm called Jake record home, which is Tim Draper, along Goran and Joseph home here who are kind of local, well known kind of entrepreneurs in the blockchain space.
Rob McNealy 16:11
So what is your revenue model? How you gonna make money with this?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 16:16
Well, right now we’re just growing our business and getting as many people to use it as humanly possible. We’re focused on user growth and and getting this out to the community. Right now. It’s free to get into lunar crash login and kind of see what’s happening on there. We also have an API and and we’re very shortly going to be coming out with a real time API. So anyone that’s, you know, a traitor, anyone that’s a little bit more advanced quant funds that are out there. We’re excited to partner with them and see kind of how they want to utilize some of the data. And so we’re just trying to understand the marketplace right now and kind of be out there and see where we have the where we have the best fit.
Rob McNealy 16:55
I think that’s really good, the way you’re kind of pulling the data together in a very visual way. And I think with crypto, that’s been such a problem. And I think it’s, I think it’s part of the the fact that so much of crypto is just developer LED and which is, you know, a hardcore command line kind of community, right. And so I think a lot of these guys out there and what as far as the developers go, they just don’t really think of UI and graphical user interfaces of things that important sometimes, or at least they, you know, underscore or plug down play. You know how important that is. But the one thing that I like what you’re doing, because I’m a very visual person, but visual representations of data can present patterns, that in trends that you cannot see with just normal tablature type of data scenarios. And I think that’s why you’re going to be successful with this because you’re lightyears ahead on your UI UX, compared to anything else that I’m seeing in crypto right now. And I’m excited It about where this is going. Because to me, this is how you get to adoption in because you’re recognizing, at least it seems like you’re recognizing how the design element is important here.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 18:12
Appreciate that, yeah, we spend a lot of time and, you know, a lot of thought and strategy and, you know, just going through and trying to put ourselves in our users shoes. And, you know, we, you know, I think it’s like when we went to one of those kind of first block stack summits at like, the Computer History Museum a couple years ago, and, you know, we were looking around at some of the different projects and we just kind of said to ourselves, it was like, you know, we need to focus on design and we need to focus on usability. You know, and it’s such a, you know, a slight usability change in any industry can have a profound effect. You know, look at look at Uber, you know, taxis existed, and, you know, people didn’t take them and it was because they didn’t want to call didn’t know who to call, they didn’t want to pay, they didn’t have cash. And so they felt bad to get into a cab and not pay and they get yelled at. And, you know, the simple, you know, design change of, you know, now I just put my credit card in and it shows up and I can, it’s really cool, I see it coming on this little map. That’s a, that’s an extremely, you know, amazing design disruption. And it’s simple. And so I think with the crypto, it’s the same thing where, you know, you’ve got these, these blockchains, and you’ve got these projects out there. And, you know, I think coin base has done an amazing job, you know, kind of building that first kind of use use case out and that on ramp that she had on ramp especially in the US. And now it’s kind of opening the door to these other tools that are out there and getting people deeper. And now it’s not just a professional trader that’s going to be on here. It’s going to be people that are a little bit more novice that don’t want to be intimidated. And so if you’re not focused on you know, helping people understand very simply how some of this stuff works, then it’s Not gonna it’s not going to work. And, you know, even when we originally started, it was, you know, we had 40 different charts on a page. And it was, you know, infinite scroll, and it just kept going and going, and it wasn’t working. And it’s not until you kind of simplify things and make it make it easy it is to where people start actually using it and understanding.
Rob McNealy 20:19
Well, it’s kind of funny the way even web design has changed over the past, you know, five years, 10 years ago, you’re trying to keep everything above the fold. And then I don’t know what happened because I stopped doing web development A long time ago, and then all of a sudden, now everything’s infinite scroll. And I’m like, didn’t we try to keep everything above the fold for a reason where people didn’t have to scroll for usability. So I don’t know what changed there. But it seems to me that usability is still important and you want to make people have to work the least amount when they’re using your site to get around. And I think you do that and I really do like the fact that you spent so much time in design and I think that is going to make this very Very useful. And it can’t believe that, you know, some of the big players as far as the trackers go, how awful their UI czar or how primitive they are. From the design standpoint, considering how much some of these trackers are bringing in revenue, you think they could bring in some design folks and fix that, but maybe they need to bring you in to fix it for them. Joe, where can people find out more about your project?
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 21:28
Linda crush calm is the easiest way. You can also find us on Twitter, we’re really active on Twitter. It’s just at Luna crush. We’re posting you know, all sorts of insights all day, we have a coin of the day that we post on each day. And that’s kind of our way to get people in and get people understanding the data for free. So that I would say go to Luna crush calm or just follow us at at Luna crush.
Rob McNealy 21:52
So thank you so much. And I do appreciate you coming on the show today. And I wish you all the luck in the future.
Joe Vezzani – Lunar Crush 21:58
And thank you my man. Appreciate it.