2022 Top 10 Resources for Learning Blockchain, Defi, NFT (Part 2)

2022 Top 10 Resources for Learning Blockchain, Defi, NFT (Part 2)
This is part 2 of our guide on how to build a strong understanding of blockchain, protocols, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and other blockchain-native concepts. Our previous post covered lessons #1 to #3. In this article, we continue with lessons #4 to #10.

About the authors: Georgiana Mirea was SVP Product at Dapper Labs and a member of its advisory board. Meanwhile, Sunita Parbhu transitioned from VP Product in Web 2.0, to working in blockchain last year. We tackled this problem for ourselves and have written this guide from our experience.

Lesson #4: Understand DeFi or NFTs
Go deep into one of these, each is a world in itself. It’s hard to go deep into both, so start with one.

If you have a finance background or are already a crypto-trader, you might find it easier to delve into DeFi. Whereas if you have a consumer product background, you might find it more intuitive to delve into NFTs.

NFTs
Until now the Non-Fungible Token world has been driven by games, collectibles, entertainment and art, so if you are passionate about any of these definitely check it out. There are other areas like real estate and climate, where NFTs could flourish.

Good overviews:

a16z for NFTs:https://future.a16z.com/nft-canon/
https://hbr.org/2021/11/making-sense-of-the-nft-marketplace
How to Make Your Own NFT Right Now • Benzinga
Play with the products:

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace
NBA Top Shot | Officially Licensed Digital Collectibles
Game-Fi (play-to-earn) — the gamification of financial mechanisms where users can earn profits by playing games. Objects in the game are expressed as NFTs and require tokens. If you’re a gamer you’ll instantly see the differences and potential. Search for games by market cap, users, a game on a specific blockchain, or for themes you enjoy.
DeFi
It’s easy to quickly understand the idea of DeFi. These links help you go deeper and get your head around the most important concepts.

Start by thoroughly understanding liquidity pools. A liquidity pool is a collection of funds locked in a smart contract. It’s a fundamental blockchain concept so be sure to thoroughly understand this before continuing.

What Are Liquidity Pools in DeFi and How Do They Work? (Binance Academy).
Then move on:

What Is an Automated Market Maker (AMM)? (Binance Academy)
AMM is a concept that doesn’t exist in traditional finance. Traditional finance has a traditional order book where buyers and sellers place orders and wait for them to be filled as matches are made. AMMs replace the notion of an order book by an algorithm that always quotes prices to all buyers and sellers. One of the earliest, most famous AMMs is Uniswap. There’s an explosion in this area, as you can see from this list of others, including dydx, Pancake Swap, etc: List of Decentralized Exchanges.
The Difference between Staking vs Yield Farming vs Liquidity Mining-— (blockchain-council.org). Token are digital assets. Staking, yield farming, and liquidity mining are all ways of putting idle digital assets to work. DeFi users can choose to act as underwriters in decentralized mutual insurance pools, provide liquidity to AMMs (via either liquidity mining or yield farming), or serve as creditors and earn governance tokens in the process. Some will decide to stake & run validator nodes for block rewards. The APYs are often lucrative and there are hundreds of different options out there. There are risks to consider and it’s always worth asking why your tokens are needed and how the yield is generated.
The Brilliance of Yield Farming, Liquidity Providing and Valuing Crypto Projects | blog maverick (Mark Cuban)
7 Indicators Every DeFi Investor Should Know | Binance Academy
List of Decentralized Exchanges — Best DEX Decentralized exchanges (defiprime.com) There are a ridiculous number of exchanges!
If you want to get hands on:

Uniswap Liquidity Provider Tutorial — Earn DEX Trading Fees (defirate.com). Providing liquidity on Uniswap is dead easy.
If you want to understand how much innovation is going on, study Flash Loans:

What Is a Flash Loan? (CoinDesk)
How to Make a Flash Loan using Aave — step-by-step beginners guides (QuickNode)
Lesson #5: Put Yourself in Daily Information Flow
This is where a lot of people start, so why did we place this step at #5? This reason is that it doesn’t help you develop deep expertise, so reading this makes a lot more sense once you have laid the foundations.

Spend 30–60 minutes every day catching up with what is happening, but don’t get derailed by it.

The worlds of crypto and blockchain are different to what you’re used to. For example, some of the important players are completely anonymous: you’ll see them giving their thoughts at a conference using their pseudonym without revealing their face. If you haven’t ever worked on open source software, you’ll find it eye-opening to see how communities engage to push projects forward.

Here’s a quick list of places to engage some of your attention:

Twitter — Culture & Personalities
Follow a few people on Twitter to get a sense of what is going on. These tweets can literally drive you crazy and have you online until 4am every night. Protect your time, but follow a few people to get a sense of the world you’re moving into.

You’ll start to notice the fervor of some of the projects. You’ll also be puzzled by the much lower engagement of seemingly “serious” projects, at least on Twitter.

See who we follow at @gmirea and @sparbhu.
Telegram and Discord — Community
Join the Discord and Telegram channels of several projects. You’ll start to understand what is normal behavior, as well as understand the power of communities.

Email Subscriptions — As it Happens Content
Subscribe to a few sources. This content isn’t about deep fundamentals, but it will help you build your feel for the space. Below are some we like which provide a good mix and, in the end, you will figure out what resonates with you. Here are some we like:

CoinDesk: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Crypto News (daily). Big headlines, funding, regulatory.
The Block
Blockworks Newsletter
Bankless (banklesshq.com)
Coindesk — First Mover (daily, Omkar Godbole). Market moves. Not too relevant but worth glancing at to see what traders are talking about.
Cointelegraph
Figment — Building Web 3 — really good to keep on top of what is happening on the various protocols
Inside Cryptocurrency (Inside.com)
Real Vision Crypto
Monthly / Quarterly Content
Apart from the daily content, you also want to sit down with meatier content every so often.

vitalik.eth on Twitter — deep papers, fun to read and thoughtful. We have Vitalik’s twitter page bookmarked, to go straight to his content without getting distracted by all the rest.
Coinbase — really good quarterly content that synthesizes trends in the industry.
Consensys — also really good quarterly content: https://consensys.net/reports/web3-report-q3-2021/?
Bankless — excellent longer content in interviews (Youtube). Their interview of Hayden Adams is worth watching.
Podcasts
Our favorites: The BreakDown , The Scoop, Unchained and Bankless.

Some of our favorite podcasts
Conferences
Attend a conference. You’ll figure out very quickly how people interact and how quickly things are moving. It’s like arriving in a new country and leaving your hotel — you’ll grow a lot by participating.

Consensys Conference — if you can, attend all 3 days and listen to everything. Consensus 2022 will be in person in NYC. There may be web-access as well. (Here’s an example from their 2021 conference: Money, Monetary Policy, and Bitcoin | Ray Dalio at Consensus 2021)
List of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conferences in 2022 (decemberlabs)
Lesson #6: Understand Project/Company Types
There are a few types of projects to understand.

Hardcore layer 1. These are knee-deep in consensus mechanisms. These are the most technically complex projects. They tend to be decentralized and open source, though not all are. DAOs and Foundations are prevalent.
Centralized crypto world. These are for-profit companies, not DAOs or Foundations. e.g. Coinbase, Binance, FTX. These are most similar to how you’ve operated to date.
Enterprises using blockchain to solve problems such as supply chain. Look at Hyperledger, Circle stablecoin, and tool providers such as Alchemy. IBM also has several partners doing interesting things such as Food Trust (a permissioned blockchain for tracking the movement of food through the supply chain) and Maersk’s TradeLens (for connecting cargo supply chain).
Applications — built on one or more layer 1 blockchains. E.g. Filecoin, DapperLabs’ various games.
Providers — ecosystem providers, which are providing services. e.g. Chainalysis, Figment.io.
If you’re interested in working on the exchange problem, you’ll see that there’s completely different ways that you could work on the problem:

Centralized — Coinbase, Binance
Decentralized — Uniswap, Pancake Swap, Sushiswap
Lesson #7: Study Counter-arguments and Risks
Read views that expose some of the risks and issues. Here are a few that are well thought through and well written.

My first impressions of web3 — well articulated by the founder of Signal, Moxie Marlinspike (super smart)
Web3 No Mercy / No Malice (Scott Galloway)
Naval Ravikant and Chris Dixon Didn’t Explain Any Web3 Use Cases ( Liron Shapira, Oct, 2021)
DSHR’s Blog: Stanford EE380 Talk
‘Scammi-ness’
Understand the shady side of blockchain and crypto! This is not to dampen your interest, but to keep yourself educated and have your eyes open. If you go into this world, you want to be careful about where you work and what the people you work with, are doing. The kinds of things that happen routinely include:

A product lead who front ran NFT sales on OpenSea for personal gain
Sophisticated rug-pulls where insiders cash out their tokens at high prices, at the expense of investors (here’s one example)
Decentralized DAO-run projects that fail to pay their community members for the work they contributed.
Hacks — CoinDesk reports on some of the bigger hacks
Rug Pulls & Other Scams: The Biggest Threat to Trust in Cryptocurrency: Rug Pulls Put 2021 Scam Revenue Close to All-time High (Chainalysis)
​​I Worked Full Time in Crypto for Two Years and Didn’t Really Like What I Saw | by Vanalli | The Startup | Medium
If you worked in the early days of ad-tech, this landscape will feel familiar: frenzied activity, and a space crowded with both gems and ultra-shady projects!

Lesson #8: Regulation
Regardless of where you want to work in the space, get acquainted with regulation. You might not be a lawyer or want to get involved in these topics, however it’s a huge part of the landscape and can cause your project/company to fail or succeed.

Unfortunately, every country has a different stance. So your research may depend on which country or countries you are most interested in. Asia is completely different to the US, which is different than Europe.

We don’t have a lot of content in this area yet, but here are a couple of good links to learn about the US environment:

Cryptocurrencies And The Securities And Exchange Commission
https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/crypto-at-congress-watershed-moment-for-regulation-and-web3/
Lesson #9: Consider DAOs
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are one of the most fascinating areas in web3! Read a little bit to see whether it excites you.

DAOs: Communities of the Future. Some thoughts on community evolution… | by Lisa Xu, First Mark Capital
If it does, there’s a lot more on DAOs:

https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/
A beginner’s guide to DAOs — Mirror (Linda Xie)
The Dao of DAOs — Not Boring by Packy McCormick
Optional link: https://future.a16z.com/building-and-running-a-dao-why-governance-matters/
Lesson #10: Make Friends, and Help
The blockchain world is still a nascent one. No-one knows everything and things are moving very fast. Talking to others helps you build your own knowledge and create “A-ha!” moments. At the same time, your perspective and questions helps others as well. So don’t be afraid — reach out!

Roles
At this point you’ve armed yourself with enough information to decide what you think of blockchain, crypto and web3, and might be thinking about a career change. There is a mind-boggling array of good options! Here’s a few questions to think about when creating a short-list of targets:

Start up / emerging project, or a big established project?
Do you want to work in an org that is centralized, or will you try working in a decentralized org? (you won’t know how well you enjoy a decentralized structure unless you try it out)
Defi or NFT or Gaming/Metaverse? Which of these do you want to be in the middle of? What excites you the most to go deeper into? For example, if you are interested in architecture as a passion, combine the best of both things that you love and look for NFT projects in the area of building worlds.
Consumer or enterprise?
How close to the tech do you want to be? Do you want to be at a layer 1 protocol, or higher up the ecosystem chain?
Do you want to take a risk? Committing to one of the layer 1 projects is riskier than, for instance, working on an enabler such as an exchange or analytics project.
What role would you like to play — product? Most of these projects also have huge needs in marketing, community, growth, and general management. Our advice is don’t worry so much about your title. Focus on problems that the project needs to solve and see if you can be helpful. If you are a PM, are you willing to re-purpose your product talents to one of these roles? These roles are mission-critical, which is a responsibility that PMs thrive on. Since this is early stage technology work, whatever role you take on, there’s a a ton of cross-functional interaction to be successful, and even if you’re not “in product” you’re going to spend a lot of your time helping the product team. For instance, if you’re running community, your job is to grow and support the community. You’re also going to be thinking about how are you going to get feedback from the community into the rest of the organization, including product? Coming from a product background you’re going to be really good at solving this.
Here’s a couple of posts that have been helpful when thinking about roles:

Where and Why do Blockchain Projects need Product Managers? (sunita.parbhu)

Leaving Tech for Crypto: Where to Work in Web3 (0xshah.xyz)

Conclusion
We’ve found it’s important to be wide and deep, and to not fall down and get stuck in rabbit holes. We learned this after going down a few rabbit holes ourselves.

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