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Posted on Apr 11, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

2022 Top 10 Resources for Learning Blockchain, Defi, NFT

So you’re a successful tech Product Manager or similar, considering a career move into the blockchain/Defi/NFT/web3 space. Or perhaps you’re already in the sector and want to broaden your horizons and point of view. Where do you start to train yourself?

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

This article gathers useful resources to build a strong understanding of blockchain, protocols, Defi, NFTs, DAOs, and other blockchain-native topics.

We’ve put together our lessons to date and collated our favorite resources. We hope you find it useful! Ping us with comments, additions or questions (@gmirea and @sparbhu).

Lesson 1— Commit to Usage (wallets, etc.)

Lesson 2— Read Widely (favorite reads)

Lesson 3— Learn Low-level Blockchain Concepts (favorite courses)

Lesson 4— Dig into DeFi or NFTs (non-fungible tokens)

Lesson 5— Put Yourself in the Daily Information Flow

Lesson 6— Understand Project/Company Types

Lesson 7— Study Counter-arguments and Risks

Lesson 8— Regulation

Lesson 9— Consider DAOs

Lesson 10 — Make friends, and Help

The post closes with some comments on how to choose your role, if you’re making a career move. It’s a hill to climb, but you can do it!

Lesson 1: Commit to Usage

You’ll internalize Web3 concepts by playing with products. It’s hugely valuable to be hands on.

What to do if you’re not already engaged:

  • Obtain a wallet. Create a wallet on Metamask. Also create other wallets (like Celo, Algorand, Terra) to see how their onboarding experience differ.
  • Buy some crypto. Funding wallets via wires is generally a pain. To get going instantly, use the in-built services that let you buy crypto using your credit card. They’re expensive to use on an ongoing basis, but okay to use when you’re just starting out.
  • Stick with Metamask and do some transactions, such as transferring between it and your other wallets. Or have a friend transact with you. You can use ETH, but then use a blockchain other than Ethereum. You’ll see transaction costs are much lower on other chains, meaning you’ll be able to play around a lot more for little cost. Metamask supports both Ethereum and several other much less expensive blockchains, like Harmony ONE.
  • Create an OpenSea account and buy an NFT, or at least marvel at the prices of some of the NFTs). For a different experience, create an account on NBA Top Shot.
  • Open a Uniswap account.

The reason that this comes before lesson #2 and #3 is because the theory you learn will make a lot more sense once you’re hands-on with a wallet and do some transactions.

💡Tip! Create a wallet for experimentation and keep very little value in it. Remember, your transactions are public and traceable. So create a learner account and remember that everything you do is public.

Lesson #2: Read Widely

How Web3 differs from Web2. Source: Consensys Web3 Report Q3 2021

There are a lot of concepts! Many are radically new with no counterpart in the Web2 world.

The good news is that there is a huge quantity of excellent content to freely access.

You’ll find high-quality lists compiled and free to use. Start by picking one of these high quality lists and reading around 10% of the content (because going through it all isn’t useful). You’ll start to see the picture and how the various pieces fit together. You’re literally stuffing your head with as many of the new concepts, alongside what you already know!

The second topic to research is use cases. If you rely on news and Twitter, only a few topics get repeated coverage so you’re missing a lot of use cases. Look for a comprehensive review such as this one:

💡Tip! If you’re a product manager, read this from Preethi Kasireddy which explains the architecture of web3 apps in a super clear way:

**You might say “It’s great to tell me to read 10% but which 10%?!”. **Here’s our approach:

  • Give priority to recent materials over old ones, unless they’re OG (Vitalik, Chris Dixon, etc)
  • Before you read, quickly skim the material to understand if it is relevant to you or not.
  • Decide which aspects interest you most, or what you need to dig deeper into. Learning is like an onion; you keep peeling back layers.

💡Tip! It won’t all make sense and at times you may feel completely overwhelmed. We preserved our sanity by doing two things:

  • Jotting down questions as you go and then moving on (example — “Staking seems crazy… how is a 103% return reasonable?”). The answer to your question will likely show up later, as you connect the dots.
  • Sketching your own mental map as you go about how everything is connected. Keep adding to it as you learn from each thing you read.

💡Tip! Bookmark links that you will refer to often:

  • CoinMarketCap — has market cap, good short descriptions and the latest news about projects.
  • DappRadar — has rankings for dApps, easy to find the top dApps for each market and compare their sizes (such as users, balances, volume).
  • CryptoFees.info — provides the actual fees earned, as another measure of activity and value of different projects.
  • Chain TVL — DefiLlama — shows movement of TVL between chains.

👀 Quick optional read: How to Become a Crypto Person: A Normie’s Guide (nymag.com)

Lesson #3: Learn Low Level Blockchain Concepts

There is a lot of content that will explain blockchain and crypto in blog or podcast forms. This only gets you so far. The fastest way to get up to speed with the basics is to take a good course and develop your low-level understanding. Top universities and top online learning companies have blockchain courses.

As a PM, you really have to get to the low-level. Even if you’re a consumer/app PM, and think you’ll “stay in the front end” in web3, you still need to do this.

Here are courses we’ve taken and liked.

  1. Stanford: Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: What You Need to Know | Stanford Online. It gave an excellent coverage of blockchain fundamentals including cryptography. It is a little dated (2018,) so it predates 2021’s rise of DeFi and NFTs. But it does predict both! The fundamentals haven’t changed — and it’s quick — so is worth doing. It’s fun to learn from Dan Boneh, Juan Benet, Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang. There’s a lengthy amount of regulatory content from a US perspective.
  2. Columbia Business School: Blockchain in Business. Gives an excellent grounding in the fundamentals of blockchain, including cryptography, which is essential if you want to really understand the space. You can also learn that from OGs Scott W. Stornetta and Stuart Haber. It covered various types of blockchain — permissioned / permissionless, public / private and also digs into governance. When we took it, it did not cover NFTs.

We’re looking at new courses, and we’ll post updates as we verify other courses that we like, for their coverage of the fundamentals, as well as ease of use. For example, https://www.pompscryptocourse.com/

**💡Tip! **If you really have only 30 minutes, 3Blue1Brown provides a very clear 30 minute video covering cryptography (digital signatures, hash functions), proof of work (Satoshi’s innovation), and how those together build a secure ledger that creates a cryptocurrency:

The Blockchain Trilemma

Once you understand the low level, learn about the Blockchain Trilemma.

The blockchain trilemma refers to a widely held belief that decentralized networks can only provide two of three benefits at any given time with respect to decentralization, security, and scalability.

For instance, Ethereum has decentralization and security, but not scalability. Solving this problem is really the domain of low-level engineers, so you’re not likely going to have a strong opinion on which chain truly has winning technology. But get familiar with this tension, as it will help you better categorize different Layer 1 projects.

Layer 1 Chains

Read through the home pages of several Layer 1 blockchain projects and see the variety of different approaches. Basically, at the moment it’s Ethereum on the one hand vs. everyone else trying to be better than Ethereum.

  • Look at some with the largest market cap: Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Algorand
  • Look at some of the specialized, well reputed ones: Celo, Flow, Polkadot
  • Look at ICP (because it is so well funded and has a completely different approach to other layer 1s)
  • Look at Filecoin (because it serves a useful function: storage, and they have excellent documentation)

As you review these, you will find that there’s completely different approaches, and sometimes contradictory ones. For instance, Ethereum 2.0 is based on sharding, as is Harmony and NEAR, while Flow (from Dapper Labs) and Mina employs no sharding. Polkadot was started to provide a multi-chain or parachain approach.

Spend time on one of the main blockchain scanners — or the scanner of any chain you are interested in:

Conclusion

We’ve found it’s important to be wide and deep, and to not get stuck in rabbit holes. We learned this after going down a few rabbit holes ourselves. Lessons #4–10 are coming up in our next post. Ping us with comments, additions or questions!

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

Georgiana & Sunita (@gmirea and @sparbhu).

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:

Play with the products:

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.

Then move on:

If you want to get hands on:

If you want to understand how much innovation is going on, study Flash Loans:

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).

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