I’ve been working on Triton in the last month while balancing a full-time job as a trust and safety PM at Robinhood. Triton was the culmination of several months spent learning about blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and the many distinct communities of individuals using them.
The best time to build something in crypto is during a crypto winter. Most people who were here just to get rich quick have already abandoned ship, and it suddenly becomes easier to cut through the noise and build something cool, that hopefully has real-world value.
I started from a foundation of vaguely knowing what a blockchain was, and ended up in a position where I’ve built a dapp and feel comfortable enough with the fundamentals to understand and even start on a whitepaper for a novel application of blockchain to phishing detection. I took a reasonably efficient on-ramp to web3, and here’s how I did it.
1. Learn about the macro landscape
It’s really difficult to understand why decentralization in finance is important without understanding why finance itself is important and why things like money even exist. These are the resources I found most valuable for understanding the macroeconomic trends that make the decentralization of finance a valuable goal.
Bankless Podcast (YouTube/Twitter)
Bankless produces some of the best content in crypto. Each episode is meticulously produced and chock full of high quality information. Going back to some of the earlier episodes and listening to them in order is a great way to understand the economic principles of crypto, as well as the evolution of the industry over the last 2–3 years.
- Interview with Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon of a16z
- Interview with Kevin O’Leary on the importance of crypto regulation
Books
Books, a technology that has existed for thousands of years, are one of the best methods to internalizing information and will probably stay that way for thousands more. (See: the Lindy phenomenon)
- To understand how and why centralized economies fail and why fiat currencies cannot last forever, read Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order and Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio
- To understand why systems composed of the small and many tend to outlast systems consisting of the large and few, read Skin in the Game and Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
There are just as many ideas that contradict these theories as those that support them, but anyone who seeks validation for the decentralization narrative will find plenty of reasons to believe in these books.
2. Learn about the technology and tools
Start here
- Read the Bitcoin whitepaper
- Read the Ethereum whitepaper
Learn a bit about these:
- Dapps (e.g. Wildcard Alliance) — “Decentralized Apps” that combines a traditional front-end and a blockchain as part of the back-end. Web3-based games represent the majority of dapps in production today.
- DeFi (e.g. Uniswap) — “Decentralized Finance”, a specific application of blockchains that replaces traditional financial services like exchanges, or in some cases introduces totally new financial products that are not possible in traditional finance.
- Wallets (e.g. MetaMask) — this is how the end users manages their tokens and interacts with the blockchain
- Layer 2 solutions (e.g. Optimism, StarkNet) — solutions built on top of the Ethereum layer 1 that offer significant improvements in scalability while still benefiting from Ethereum’s security
Then skip to step 3 and spend some time learning about each tool you discover and where it fits into the web3 ecosystem. I recommend taking some time to learn about the following concepts when you run into them:
3. Go and build something
There’s nothing that will help you learn faster than diving into a project and getting your hands dirty. I started my journey with a Udacity Blockchain Developer nanodegree, but I don’t recommend it. Coursera, Udacity, and most MOOCs charge $100s or even $1000s for courses with outdated information that takes months to materialize into a project. There are much better resources in 2022 for developers who already have a strong technical foundation, Buildspace being one of the better ones. Buildspace projects do a better job of getting you to the point where you can comfortably deploy a smart contract or launch an ERC-721 token, in 1/10th the time and for free.
- Build a dapp on Ethereum in one weekend
- Launch your own NFT collection on Ethereum in a couple of days
They’ll even help you find a job or demo to VCs to raise funding afterwards — I cannot recommend Buildspace enough for anyone with even a middling interest in getting their hands dirty and building something that works.
