Larry Cermak

2020 has been a turbulent year for all asset classes. The foreign exchange market, which is usually somewhat stable, is no exception. National currencies have been the most volatile in years as the world grapples with government stimulus programs, new central bank policies responding to COVID-19, and implications of a chaotic U.S. election as well […]

By looking at the largest crypto assets by market cap, it’s apparent that most of the projects that are worth the most are still Layer-1 blockchains. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of these blockchains have very little on-chain activity.  While it’s hard to distinguish between the real economic activity and inflated […]

A non-custodial exchange Serum was announced in late July amid the DeFi craze and launched in late August. Serum is the brainchild of the Serum Foundation — which includes FTX and Alameda Research staff, as well as external partners and advisors. Some of the partners include Multicoin Capital, Kyber Network, CoinGecko, and Gauntlet Network. The advisors include […]

Bitcoin and Ethereum are having a really good year; Bitcoin’s price has increased 156.5% YTD while Ethereum soared 348.0%. PayPal’s crypto offering is already generating “2–3x expected demand,” and Cash App generated $1.6 billion worth of bitcoin sales in 3Q (representing ~90% of all cumulative sales prior to that). Moreover, 2020 appears to be the […]

After months and months of rumors, PayPal finally announced in October that it will allow its customers to buy and sell Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The PayPal ecosystem is massive; it boasts more than 320 million active accounts (not including merchants). Due to regulatory and technological complexity, PayPal is, of course, not handling cryptocurrency directly […]

Given the pseudo-anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies, it’s nearly impossible to accurately estimate how many people use them and where they are located. However, by looking at the traffic on cryptocurrency exchanges, we can get a directionally accurate representation of which countries are using cryptocurrencies the most. According to The Block’s findings South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, […]

Betting on the results of the presidential elections is a massive market. Last week (still a week before the election), one of the largest betting sites Betfair said more than £200 million (~$260M) has been bet on the election so far. Betfair predicted that based on the previous trends, the 2020 election could break £400 […]

Harvest Finance, a DeFi yield aggregator created by anonymous developers, was exploited Monday morning UTC time, and the hacker was able to take out $24 million in profit.  DeFi exploits This comes after a handful of exploits that targeted the nascent DeFi ecosystem this year. In February, $1 million in profit was taken by attackers […]

Binance, the largest crypto-to-crypto exchange based on reported volume, has finished its 13th quarterly burn on October 17th. The exchange took away the equivalent of $68 million in BNB from circulation, which is a 12.4% increase from $60.50 million in Q2 2020. This burn once again marks the largest burn Binance has ever made. Source: […]

The crypto market structure has matured drastically in the last three years and this has led to several changes in the old dynamic. This shift was explained well by Arun Balaji of Paradigm and Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX but ultimately comes down to (I.) the growth of derivatives (futures and options) vs. just spot, (II.) […]

Bitcoin still remains correlated to equities but data shows that the correlation only spikes up following bad macro performance and then completely disappears when the macro environment performs well. Bloody March The U.S. stock market suffered the sharpest decline in its history in March, as the world grappled with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. […]

After hours of speculation, Singaporean exchange KuCoin admitted in a blog post released last Friday that it had “detected some large withdrawals” since September 26, 2020. “Some large withdrawals” turned out to be the third-largest exchange hack in history. The total amount based on the disclosed addresses is about $278.6 million at the time of […]

DeFi tokens as a whole have had record performance in July and August; severely outperforming Bitcoin and Ethereum.  FTX’s DeFi index has reached a peak of $3,500 on September 1 and has since dropped by 44% and is currently sitting at a 50-day low of $1,960.  Source: Tradingview, FTX Why now? As always, it’s hard […]

Cryptocurrency markets are unique because they are global and open 24/7, which introduces interesting dynamics. The regular trading session on the U.S. stock market is 6.5 hours a day — from 9:30 am until 4 pm. But the weekends and holidays are closed so there are normally 252 trading days a year, meaning that the stock market […]

Ever since the inception of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency space has ideologically been rooted in open-source. The vast majority of projects in the ecosystem are developed as open-source , meaning that anyone can review the code, propose modifications, or even fork the project.  However, this also means that projects can’t really protect their intellectual property rights. In […]

Mass adoption is a popular topic of discussion among the cryptocurrency circles, with many believing it’s right around the corner. However, the data still doesn’t support this hypothesis. Data on the number of people using or investing in cryptocurrencies is sparse and usually comes from surveys with questionable methodologies. There are several proxies, that can […]

The inability to truly diversify their cryptocurrency holdings remains a major issues for cryptocurrency investors. When the price of one cryptocurrency falls, generally the majority of other cryptocurrencies will fall as well.  High cross-asset correlation is also a serious issue for crypto-collateralized stablecoins such as Dai. When prices drop rapidly, the collateral backing Dai gets […]