Building Real-World DeFi Protocols in Public - The Mission đ
40% Journal - 40% Tutorial - 20% Alpha
Inelegantly Falling Backwards Down the web3 Rabbithole
This is the story of how Iâm becoming a crypto builder and it might hopefully illuminate a path for how you can do the same
Since thereâs so much money to be made in crypto itâs actually a really easy to fall into the trap of just being a consumer
Itâs the most permissionless space ever created, anyone can contribute just by starting to do stuff⊠and yet the default activity of âdoing web3â becomes just refreshing Twitter trying to catch hold of the next ârotationâ that @satsdart or @TaikiMaeda2 etc start mentioning (absolutely no hate to those guys btw I learn so much from them â€ïž)
But web3 succeeding isnât 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 donât do anything about it, nothing will actually happen and we wonât simply âall make itâ
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, Letâs 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 âjust get involved in a Discord lolâ is lowkey hard when thereâs like 30 million Discords with 30 million members each and most of if is just âwen airdropâ 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 Iâm @tdrlz on Twitter! Iâm not the best at replying to stuff at the moment but I promise Iâm 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 đ„đ„ insane crypto bullrun đ„đ„ is over and you actually have to think about what youâre buying
Iâve noticed for the last few months Iâm not right about everything in the market anymore and itâs no longer just as easy as âoh boy a new L2 time to rotate the bags and buy another Teslaâ
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 youâre deep into the web3 building scene
Especially because the allure of crypto means most people think theyâre 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 Onlyâąïž?! Getting a mf job with some income pouring in
c) Fun
Sports are a lot more fun when youâre dangerous
So when it comes to crypto I already enjoy it loads now so imagine how fun itâs gonna be when Iâm the Kevin De Bruyne of crypto rather than some random overweight dude in the stands
Plus itâs just my personality, Iâve always been a builder
Whatâs my Experience Coming in btw?
Iâll wait for my UpOnly invite to give the full biography but basically Iâm 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 youâre not hating what youâre 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 đ
Iâve been developing software for years but honestly itâs been a while since Iâve done some hardcore coding (the beauty of founding a startup haha đ )
For example I always thought I âgotâ 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 âwait what the hell is useEffect lol?!â
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 itâs the worldâs best marketing)
I still believe these 4 steps are a good roadmap, however what I drastically underestimated is that the gap between Step 2 â 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
Theyâre 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 ânow go and use this stuff in your own projectsâ is extremely steep. Once you graduate the hand-holding tutorial stage youâre basically faced with a brick wall
This is very understandable - itâs a symptom that weâre very early here and we shouldnât complain
If there are clearly signposted steps and perfect tutorials every step of the way by the time you start learning a technology itâs probably a signal youâre that not early anymore
Since weâre so early:
The development ecosystem evolves extremely rapidly and educational materials become out of date very quickly
There arenât many agreed upon patterns for âthis is how we do thingsâ - in fact large scale DeFi projects run by omega-brains are still being hacked on a regular basis, weâre clearly still figuring this out (luckily DeFi is anti-fragile)
Because: Gotchas Transitioning web2 â web3 dev
Working with blockchain stuff is a lot âcloser to the machineâ that many of us cushy web/mobile devs are used to
Iâm 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:
âoh 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 nowâ
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 Iâve had for years and has reignited my love of coding đ
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 itâs 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 havenât really been solved much before, you work a lot more from first principles and instinct
I sit here feeling like Iâm a Nasa Engineer in the 1960s Space Race writing lunar landing code because I canât just fall back onto âgoogle it and the top StackOverflow answer will have 2000+ upvotesâ or âthereâs probably a gem/NPM package that solves this alreadyâ
As more devs get a taste of this weâre 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 - itâs not work itâs 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 weâre gonna be building here is called Emerald Finance âïž (plz donât steal the Twitter handle I havenât claimed it yet)
This isnât gonna be a tutorial toy-product. As best as I can Iâm gonna be putting something out there that is production-ready and that Iâd feel confident in holding real life TVL
Nader Dabit canât 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 itâs 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!
Iâm not the expert here
In fact there are very few experts here full stop. Thereâs 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 âgotchas that got meâ 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 thereâs so much potential in crypto & weâre all so early right now thereâs no need to be mean to each other weâre all gonna make it
Since Iâm 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 đ
If youâre not good at this stuff yet, hit me up anyway @tdrlz itâll inspire me to code & write faster rather than carrying my mates in Warzone
Where are we at the Moment?
Iâm currently halfway through building the backend of Emerald Finance âïž (just got the idea to blog about it), so the first couple posts will be âretrospectiveâ
This is a good thing because you now know thereâs something real here, itâs already had significant effort invested and Iâm 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 âïž
đš KEY ALPHA ALERT #1 đš
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 Iâve 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 youâre doing in crypto:
KEEP A JOURNAL
Write everything in it, start today
Itâs super easy to overcomplicate this and try incorporate tagging and linking and rich media etc. The more complex the system the less youâll 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 Iâve 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 âïž
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 letâs goooooo!
Cheers lads, until next time!
drilla