The DeFi Revolution, Part 2

This is Part 2 of my 2-part blog post on DeFi, Part 1 can be found here. Part 1 talked about Speculators and Consumers, this one will talk about the Developers who build the infrastructure and products to make it happen.

Developers

After understanding the DeFi space I wanted to get some keyboard time and play around with smart contracts. Smart contracts are what drives the entire cryptocurrency, DeFi and NFT space. The two standards are ERC-20 for cryptocurrencies and ERC-721 for NFTs, everything else is derived from those two technical specs.

The VERY first thing I would do is watch Nader Dabit’s YouTube video on Full Stack Ethereum development and his accompany article – The Complete Guide to Full Stack Ethereum Development.

Then I would look at the following resources to gain more knowledge:

• Dapp University on YouTube – A great resource to build Dapps
• EatTheBlocks YouTube Channel – Ethereum smart contracts development
• Finematics – Educational videos on DeFi
• freeCodeCamp – Has some good tutorials on Ethereum development
• Into the Ether podcast – Talks about the latest DeFi products and about the Layer 1 and Layer 2 issues of EthereumI hope this gives you a start to learn more about DeFi and hopefully you dip your toes into DeFi and see what this revolution is all about.

ENZO – My Cryptocurrency

So what did I do with all this knowledge that I gained? As a project I decided to create my own cryptocurrency called ENZO. It’s a very basic ERC-20 smart contract but it shows you how quickly a cryptocurrency can be created and literally out of thin air.

All my source code is on GitHub which you can review, remix and deploy on your own.

Word Salad Revisited

Okay, in Part 1 I mentioned a bunch of name and now let me go through each one and explain them:

• Solidity – an object-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts
• OpenZeppelin – open source boilerplate templates for creating smart contracts
• ERC-20 – standard for Fungible Tokens, in other words, they have a property that makes each Token the same (cryptocurrencies)
• ERC-721 – standard for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), meaning each token is unique
• MetaMask – a software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain
• Mainnet – the production grade Ethereum blockchain
• Ropsten – a testing blockchain that closely emulates Mainnet
• Truffle – a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for blockchains using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
• Ganache – a personal blockchain for rapid Ethereum
• Web3 – a collection of libraries which allow you to interact with a local or remote ethereum node
• Ethers – another JavaScript library to interact with the Ethereum blockchain
• Hardhat – another Ethereum development framework like Truffle
• Infura – allows you to connect to Mainnet and the testing blockchains

With all this information hopefully you will dip your toes into DeFi and see what this revolution is all about.