Building Real-World DeFi Protocols in Public - The Mission 🙌
40% Journal - 40% Tutorial - 20% Alpha
Inelegantly Falling Backwards Down the web3 Rabbithole
This is the story of how I’m becoming a crypto builder and it might hopefully illuminate a path for how you can do the same
Since there’s so much money to be made in crypto it’s actually a really easy to fall into the trap of just being a consumer
It’s the most permissionless space ever created, anyone can contribute just by starting to do stuff… and yet the default activity of ‘doing web3’ becomes just refreshing Twitter trying to catch hold of the next ‘rotation’ that @satsdart or @TaikiMaeda2 etc start mentioning (absolutely no hate to those guys btw I learn so much from them ❤️)
But web3 succeeding isn’t the default outcome here. Yeah we all share this amazing utopian vision of what crypto is gonna do to the world and we all have formed huge conviction for ourselves. But if we the people of web3 don’t do anything about it, nothing will actually happen and we won’t simply ‘all make it’
Kinda like that episode of Simpsons where Bart runs against Martin for class president and whips up this big campaign and the whole school is giga-bullish Bart but in the end nobody actually bothers to vote and Martin wins by 2 votes to 0
Guys, Let’s Build
So this is the story of how I actually get off my ass and actually start building and contributing to this actually wonderful space
This is why I wanna do it:
a) Make web3 Friends
All my irl mates think crypto is a scam and are gonna hold an intervention if I mention it one more time
My girl enters standby mode and starts mentally watching Gilmore Girls in her head every time I try explain Bitcoin as an inflation hedge
tbh I kinda like having a non-crypto world outside crypto. When I walk away from the code, the tweets and the charts I wanna talk about the important things in life like niche football statistics
The default advice for social newcomers of “just get involved in a Discord lol” is lowkey hard when there’s like 30 million Discords with 30 million members each and most of if is just ‘wen airdrop’ and spamming for whitelist
It would be fun to find some web3 friends to do this stuff with, if you like what you read here come say hi I’m @tdrlz on Twitter! I’m not the best at replying to stuff at the moment but I promise I’m working on becoming less of a lurker
b) Alpha & Profit
As Warren Buffet once said:
You gotta find yourself an edge in the market boi
Especially now the most recent phase of the 🔥🔥 insane crypto bullrun 🔥🔥 is over and you actually have to think about what you’re buying
I’ve noticed for the last few months I’m not right about everything in the market anymore and it’s no longer just as easy as “oh boy a new L2 time to rotate the bags and buy another Tesla”
Meaningfully contributing and getting knee-deep with the other devs that are actually creating this stuff is the best way to get an edge, get your nose ahead of the crowd and generate your own alpha
Frankly it would be quite impressive to manage to not get rich over the coming years if you’re deep into the web3 building scene
Especially because the allure of crypto means most people think they’re gonna get rich by purely trading/investing their way all the way up. Fair enough yeah the OG himself @cobie managed it but bröther when your portfolio size is $218 you know what strategy is truly Up Only™️?! Getting a mf job with some income pouring in
c) Fun
Sports are a lot more fun when you’re dangerous
So when it comes to crypto I already enjoy it loads now so imagine how fun it’s gonna be when I’m the Kevin De Bruyne of crypto rather than some random overweight dude in the stands
Plus it’s just my personality, I’ve always been a builder
What’s my Experience Coming in btw?
I’ll wait for my UpOnly invite to give the full biography but basically I’m an ex-web2 founder who exited to join the degeneracy because I wanna put an anime pfp on my LinkedIn without my investors holding a vote of no-confidence
By the way, if you’re not hating what you’re reading feel free to drop your email here for updates on future posts, no spam ever unless I need invites to get whitelist for an NFT project or am starting a Coin Pumping Discord Server 😉
I’ve been developing software for years but honestly it’s been a while since I’ve done some hardcore coding (the beauty of founding a startup haha 🙃 )
For example I always thought I ‘got’ React and have been always able to achieve whatever frontend I wanted with it, and then recently opened a fullstack web3 tutorial and was like “wait what the hell is useEffect lol?!”
The world I grew up in is gone
Truth: Starting to Code web3 is Challenging af
When I started dipping my toes in web3 I got on a roll and posted the most Dunning-Krugerish tweet of my life (actually the only tweet of my life at the time of writing this so not that impressive I guess)
It unbelievably managed to get a smidgeon of traction, I assume because people love the idea of an easy defined way to get a 6 figure job (I taught coding bootcamps in the past believe me it’s the world’s best marketing)
I still believe these 4 steps are a good roadmap, however what I drastically underestimated is that the gap between Step 2 → Step 3 is huuuuuge
Because: Lack of Intermediate Resources
There are now approximately 1.8 billion identical blog posts about how to setup your own ERC20 token
They’re basically just copy-pastes of the OpenZeppelin ERC20 documentation with an occasional tired ETH gas price joke thrown in
The beginner stuff is now covered very well and it gives you a false sense of confidence, but the cliff into intermediate “now go and use this stuff in your own projects” is extremely steep. Once you graduate the hand-holding tutorial stage you’re basically faced with a brick wall
This is very understandable - it’s a symptom that we’re very early here and we shouldn’t complain
If there are clearly signposted steps and perfect tutorials every step of the way by the time you start learning a technology it’s probably a signal you’re that not early anymore
Since we’re so early:
The development ecosystem evolves extremely rapidly and educational materials become out of date very quickly
There aren’t many agreed upon patterns for ‘this is how we do things’ - in fact large scale DeFi projects run by omega-brains are still being hacked on a regular basis, we’re clearly still figuring this out (luckily DeFi is anti-fragile)
Because: Gotchas Transitioning web2 → web3 dev
Working with blockchain stuff is a lot ‘closer to the machine’ that many of us cushy web/mobile devs are used to
I’m used to so many abstraction layers that give me humungous leverage as a dev - for example I basically never once had to worry about memory usage in my life
While writing something complex in a startup environment:
“oh our quick & dirty implementation is putting a ton of load on our server? Just throw another Heroku dyno at it for $25/month lol because that will be a much more effective use of our limited time/money resources than a deep refactor right now”
However writing for a blockchain is an incredibly constrained environment, you go from writing code for beefy cheap personal AWS servers with a CDN to basically writing programs for a single shared Raspberry Pi that the whole world has equal access to run code on
The constraints are natural to prevent bad actors and to tell you the truth, I absolutely love them
Silver Lining: web3 is Gonna Grab the Hearts & Minds of Worlds Best Devs
These unique constraints and having to ingeniously work around them in the context of a shared public ledger being your data layer is the most fun I’ve had for years and has reignited my love of coding 😍
Building in web2 is fun for what you can achieve, especially by linking existing services together in new and interesting ways. However ultimately the actual mechanical act of coding the stuff becomes a bit stale since it’s basically all just glueing together CRUD and APIs in different ways
Coding web3 makes you feel like a badass again
You have to solve real problems that haven’t really been solved much before, you work a lot more from first principles and instinct
I sit here feeling like I’m a Nasa Engineer in the 1960s Space Race writing lunar landing code because I can’t just fall back onto “google it and the top StackOverflow answer will have 2000+ upvotes” or “there’s probably a gem/NPM package that solves this already”
As more devs get a taste of this we’re going to see a growing tidal wave of the most motivated elite developers moving from web2 to web3 because the real challenges are here and the satisfaction you get from solving them is amazing - it’s not work it’s play
Coding web3 feels like the type of coding elite devs do in their spare time for fun outside of their 9-5, and that is so powerful
So What Journey are we Gonna go on Here?
These posts are gonna be part-journal part-tutorial as I bounce painfully from one mistake to the other on the path to producing a fully functional real world DeFi protocol from scratch
The product we’re gonna be building here is called Emerald Finance ❇️ (plz don’t steal the Twitter handle I haven’t claimed it yet)
This isn’t gonna be a tutorial toy-product. As best as I can I’m gonna be putting something out there that is production-ready and that I’d feel confident in holding real life TVL
Nader Dabit can’t carry the entire web3 dev education scene on his shoulders. Maybe my experiences will illuminate some sort of rough path for you to see how to start levelling up in the web3 world for fun & profit. However it’s much more likely my experiences will illuminate mostly what not to do - which is also useful in its own way
Your Chance to Join in!
I’m not the expert here
In fact there are very few experts here full stop. There’s literally probably less than 100 really top-tier Solidity devs worldwide and most of them are probably the same guy (looking at you @banteg)
I am including as many mistakes and ‘gotchas that got me’ as possible, but there is a very good chance I am still potato-braining stuff
If you are actually good at this stuff and spot any potato-brain things I have done please let me know in the comments on this post or hit me up on Twitter at @tdrlz!
Just be nice about it haha, one of my favourite hobbies is avoiding drama and negativity, and there’s so much potential in crypto & we’re all so early right now there’s no need to be mean to each other we’re all gonna make it
Since I’m gonna be writing this mostly as I go along you might even help me fix some exploits or bugs before the final product goes live! At which point you will receive the white hat bounty of: personal satisfaction at being shouted out on a blog that nobody knows exists 😌
If you’re not good at this stuff yet, hit me up anyway @tdrlz it’ll inspire me to code & write faster rather than carrying my mates in Warzone
Where are we at the Moment?
I’m currently halfway through building the backend of Emerald Finance ❇️ (just got the idea to blog about it), so the first couple posts will be ‘retrospective’
This is a good thing because you now know there’s something real here, it’s already had significant effort invested and I’m 100% committed to seeing this out through to the end unless I get offered a 7-figure job by Alameda or an attractive enough Twitter persona DMs me with a promotion offer for a shill project in the meantime ✌️
🚨 KEY ALPHA ALERT #1 🚨
Writing these first posts retrospectively was easy because luckily I was keeping a building journal along the way
This is already the single biggest piece of alpha I can share with you and like a silly goose I’ve given it away to you right in the first post (if you listen carefully you can hear the agonised screams of thousands of growth hackers everywhere)
No matter what you’re doing in crypto:
KEEP A JOURNAL
Write everything in it, start today
It’s super easy to overcomplicate this and try incorporate tagging and linking and rich media etc. The more complex the system the less you’ll use it
I keep things embarrassingly simple and literally just have 3 pinned notes in my Apple Notes app:
Trading/Investing/DeFi Journal
Building Journal
Crypto Thoughts/Philosophical Crap that I’ve probably just stolen from Naval Ravikant
Every day I rock up to my desk I just add a new line at the top with the date and write away in bullet points underneath as I do stuff, thing stuff & make mistakes
This has been the single most useful thing I have done, it has:
Made me a better developer
Made me a ton of money from tracking my trading/investing mistakes
And makes me happy to scroll down every couple of weeks after a particularly hard day and see how much I sucked at this stuff a couple of weeks ago :)
Our Next Post Will Cover:
The protocol that we will be building here: Emerald Finance ❇️
Things like: What is it, what is the rationale behind why the world needs it, and how do I qualify for the airdrop?
What are the first steps in building it and why they kinda failed, including fun stuff like which chain I decide to build it on and why (boy what an emotional rollercoaster that was)
If you wanna join the journey drop your email here and let’s goooooo!
Cheers lads, until next time!
drilla