The Survivor’s Journal ⛹🏼♂️
Reflecting on crypto alphas, from then to now
Hello!
Every Saturday I dive into a podcast by our partners at Decentralised.co and share what caught my attention.
This week, I'm reflecting on an episode that explores how crypto often talks about founders, not operators. This is one of those operator stories — gritty, useful, a little bleak.
Listen to the full episode here.
Most people discover crypto. Larry Cermak limped into it, quite literally.
A busted knee ended his basketball run. Finance caught his eye next. By 2016, he was knee-deep (no pun intended) in Bitcoin research at a time when crypto was mostly split between evangelists calling it the future of money and academics calling it a bubble waiting to burst. Larry found the space in between. He stayed there, wrote what he saw, and built an audience when almost no one else was writing objectively.
Although the conversation was recorded in November 2024, just a couple of days ahead of the US Presidential Elections, the episode served as a useful time capsule. You hear a version of crypto that is still frozen in time.
From Researcher to Firefighter
One bit that really landed for me about the conversation was that Larry loved being in research. Doing it. CEO? Not so much.
“As CEO, you’re the person people bring problems to,” he said.
You get the sense that he didn’t seek the role, but inherited it post-FTX cleanup. The former CEO had loans to pay off, the company needed a buyer, and someone had to pull the M&A process together. That someone was Larry. It aged him, he says, “ten years in two.”
He is honest in his thesis about ETH.
ETH was undervalued, DeFi was obvious, and everyone else missed it. That’s what created the edge. Anybody who went in early
But by 2024, he admits the game’s changed. “Making 50-100x is so much harder now … Your only way now is to gamble memecoins. That’s not what I want to be doing in my free time”.
This bit didn’t age well for us, did it?
We have all been or known someone who’s been on the rollercoaster ride that $TRUMP and Javier Milei’s $LIBRA took the world on.
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ETH Is Elegant. Solana Works.
Larry’s take on Ethereum vs Solana is one of the few that doesn’t devolve into tribalism.
Despite admitting Ethereum as technically a more “elegant” chain, he feels Solana works because it fixed the UX and made it easier for the retail users to navigate.
You can sense his frustration with Ethereum’s UX.
Users paid 20–30% in gas to buy a $100 token on Ethereum in 2021. Complex bridging. Fragmented liquidity. It’s not that Ethereum is bad, it’s just hard, especially for retail users.
Solana, for all its faults, doesn’t have that problem. It’s smoother, faster, and cheaper. That makes it sticky and retail-friendly.
Interesting that this comes from someone who built his career writing about Ethereum and the entire DeFi world built on the very chain.
I think the take still holds true. Even now, post-ETFs, post-Farcaster Frames, even post-PUMP.
Larry also gave a 15% probability for Solana to beat Ethereum. Well, that one might be worth revisiting soon. Despite its stubbornness to show a strong movement, Ethereum outperformed Solana since the start of November 2024.
Zooming Out
Crypto used to be about whether it would survive. Now the conversation is around whether it can scale meaningfully. Can it move beyond Coinbase- or other centralised exchange-held BTC and into daily use without the user even knowing it’s crypto?
Larry’s less excited today, he says. I get that. Like he said, the most exciting part – ETFs, corporate treasuries, clearer regulations – is already underway. But I feel there’s still a lot to look forward to.
Survival was never the end goal. It was just the start.
See you next week.
Off to trigger some ETH x SOL fights on CT for weekend sport.
Prathik
Check out the podcast to hear Larry Cermak’s full conversation with Saurabh Deshpande about token launches, public valuations and founders wanting to build cool stuff.
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