Onboarding to web3

Web3 is like democracy. For the community, by the community, of the community. By nature, it's an open system. For beginners, it's a daunting task - from where to start. In this post, I am sharing my personal learning experience of working with the web.

Start with the investments. As a believer, your first step could be buying cryptocurrencies. In the buying process itself, you can get exposure to exchanges, wallets, and different currencies. For starters, the safest options are BTC & ETH (these two coins will be here for sure). Crypto goes through winter cycles every couple of a half. As per my personal experience, BTC & ETH hold the values over a period of time. There are various other ways (without buying) to get the crypto - coinbase earn, layer3 - a bounty program

Consuming content online (Twitter). This is the trickiest and most interesting part. Trickiest in the sense that how do you trust the content and source. We have various social media platforms. Among all these platforms, the most crypto-related activity happens on Twitter & discord. TBH the best could be joining various discord channels but I would not encourage it for the newbies (Discord users are prone to scams). If you are in crypto, you should start with Twitter. Try to follow the?big believers?in crypto. Few common names:- Chris Dixon, Shriram, Avichal Garg, A16Z, Mike Dudas, etc. They frequently post about crypto. I have got tons of important articles, posts, and paper links from their profile. Use twitter advance search to narrow down your search.

Books.?I read a couple of books. Not a lot. A few important ones are:-

1. Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps - This one is really good for the starters. You may have to revisit this book many times, as your knowledge builds up.

2. Mastering the Lightning Network (quite technical) - Detailed study on the bitcoin lightning network.

Youtube channels. Youtube has amazing crypto-specific channels that you can follow. I watched various videos from the following channels

1. Whiteboard Crypto?- Quite helpful in getting information on various crypto topics. Rich content and easy to understand.
2. Bankless?- It's a podcast.
3. ConBureau?- Quite extensive on trending crypto products/topics.
4. Learning Solidity and Dapps?- This youtube session is quite long (16hrs). It has tons of information. If you want to be a blockchain developer in the future then definitely try to watch the entire tutorials and write the code.

Key concepts/topics to explore

1. Blockchains - bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana
2. Consensus modal - Proof of Work, Proof of Stake
3. Wallets - Metamask, Phantom, Coinbase wallet, Trust wallet, Solflare wallet.
4. NFT, Defi, DAO - Opensea, MagicEden, Uniswap, Aave, SyndicateDAO
5. Solidity/Rust - Mainly for the developers
6. Oracles - Chainlink
7. Cross-chain bridges - Wormhole, LayerZero
8. Data analytics tool - Dune Analytics
9. Node providers - Alchemy, Moralis, Quicknode

Patience & Keep trying: - For laymen crypto means Bitcoin. In reality, Bitcoin is one small part of this entire ecosystem. So take a chill pill :) It takes time to learn new skills. Crypto is a revolutionary game-changing concept. It takes time to read, consume and understand the work. In this post, I have just covered a few concepts, which are useful for beginners. In the last one year, I have consumed tons of information in crypto (much more than what I covered in the rest of my career).

PS: If you are working on web3 product/ideas, reach out to me for any feedback/suggestions.