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

sunita.parbhu
10 min readFeb 9, 2022

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:

Play with the products:

DeFi

It’s easy to quickly understand the idea of DeFi at a high level. Transactions are executed via smart contracts, that execute as written without the need of an intermediary. 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is a collection of funds locked in a smart contract, where the smart contract determines how liquidity is added and withdrawn. It’s a fundamental blockchain concept so be sure to thoroughly understand this before continuing.

Then move on:

If you want to get hands on:

If you want to understand how innovative the space is, study Flash Loans, a finance product that has no counterpart in traditional finance:

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.

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:

Monthly / Quarterly Content

Apart from the daily content, you also want to sit down with meatier content every so often.

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.

Lesson #6: Understand Project/Company Types

There are a few types of projects to understand.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. Applications — built on one or more layer 1 blockchains. E.g. Filecoin, DapperLabs’ various games.
  5. 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.

‘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:

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:

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.

If it does, there’s a lot more on DAOs:

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.

Send us your comments, your favorite sources and tips!

Add your comment or request to our issues/improvements log.

Georgiana & Sunita (@gmirea and @sparbhu).

Blockchain
Cryptocurrency
Defi
Nft
Web3

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sunita.parbhu

Written by sunita.parbhu

1.1K Followers

Start ups, emerging technologies, markets, economics, network effects, behavior; software products

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