How to get started in Web3: Blockchain, Crypto, and NFT’s

Rahat: Awesome. Thank you for joining this talk. I'm going to be talking about how to get started in web three. Talking a little bit about blockchain, crypto and NFTs, and, hopefully it gets to answer some of the questions I saw a pop up. So just a little bit about our agenda for today.

Rahat: We're going to be talking about like blockchain technology in general, a little brief explanation of it. We're going to do like a little bit of a demo of like how blockchain works. We're going to go over some popular blockchains. I'm gonna look at tokens, both fungible and non fungible. So that's like regular tokens and NFTs.

Rahat: Look at some use cases for NFTs. And for, you know, if you're interested in learning how to, you know, dive into the web three space, I'll be sharing some tools to help you start. Real quick. And it was mentioned before I'm a hot, I'm a developer advocate over at polygon previously. I was a front end engineer and a solidity engineer sort of an indie hacker.

Rahat: And what three enthusiasts, a couple of places you can find me if you ever have questions after this would be on Twitter, LinkedIn, or you can go on my get hub and look at different code samples. If you're interested in learning more about what three stuff. So the first thing we'll just kind of dive into is like, what is a blockchain?

Rahat: So you'll see a definition here. It's a distributed database shared among nodes on a network. What does that mean nodes? There's basically just a fancy term for computers. So you can kind of imagine the blockchain as being like this gigantic database shared among a bunch of different computers all over the world.

Rahat: All these computers have like different copies of that same blockchain and they're all keeping track of like the data that. All of the data that is in the blockchain are linked by complex puzzles. So you can kind of look at it like a jigsaw puzzle. Each of the blocks on the blockchain fit together in a specific way.

Rahat: And that's going to probably make a little bit more sense when you're going into our demo. But essentially it's almost like a very large linked list. Everything is kind of linked to each other. Yeah, one of the cool things about the blockchain, because it's distributed because there's like copies of it across all these different nodes.

Rahat: Having a consensus of like all of the data that exists on it makes it very harder near impossible to like go back and change and update to like some malicious data and some malicious transactions and things like that. And so that leads to it becoming a source of truth. It's a permissionless source of truth that we can house different types of.

Rahat: So, what does all that mean? I'm going to show you a quick demo here. This is on enter enters brown road.com/blockchain. And we're going to start from like the very sort of like basis of the data and like kind of build up from there. So right now we're going to just be talking all that a shot 2 56.

Rahat: Do if you look into this data block, let's say I add my name in here. Rot red is now represented by this big alpha numeric hashed value, right? So this is how data is represented on a blockchain. If I do something as simple as just like updating the capitalization of my name, the entire hash changes.

Rahat: So this is all like, there's a lot of crypto graphical calculations that go on in the background that create this hash. So that's, that's like the basis of data. This is how data is stored on a blockchain. I will slowly look at an actual block. So each block on the blockchain has some data associated to it.

Rahat: There's a block number. There's this thing called a nonce, which just means number that's only used once, the actual data and then the hash that is associated to all of this. So, what is this number that's only used once in order to validate data on the blockchain, these nodes or the people running these nodes who are called miners, they need to actually calculate what this nonce is that is associated to this hash value.

Rahat: Once they calculate what that nonce is that essentially validates the data on the blockchain, and to do that at costs, it can cost a lot of money. We pay what's called like gas fees in order for them to actually run these calculations. And we're gonna be talking a little bit more about gas fees in a little bit, but let's add some data in here.

Rahat: So I'm going to just add my name hot, and you'll notice that the entire block just went red. The reason it went red is because these hashed values with this data are, does not correspond to this nonce. So now we have to mine and figure out what the actual nonces. And now it's 5, 5 0 2, essentially.

Rahat: Anytime I add any sort of data, even if I had like a space value, this hash will update. I need to remind and figure out what the nonce is in order for this block to be validated on the blockchain. So now let's add a bunch of blocks together and look at the blockchain itself. So same concept as before, right?

Rahat: I've got all these blocks with the block number of the nods and some data, but now I've got these previous values. So before, when I was telling you like this kind of like a jigsaw puzzle or a linked list, this is kind of like a visualization of that. So you'll see here that I have a hash value here and then a previous value on the next one that corresponds to that.

Rahat: So let's go ahead and again, I'm going to update this and put in my name. You'll notice, not only did the first block become red, and if I mind it it'll become green, but every other block after it is also red, because the previous value no longer corresponds to this hash. So now if I change something on the first block, I have to go in and remind every single block that comes after it, so that all of the previous values linked together properly to everything that came before it.

Rahat: And this is like one of the really powerful things about the blockchain. If I want to add something at the end of it, great. I can write. Pretty easy to do that, but if I want to go back and like update something in the first block, update something in the second block, I have to then remind every single other block that came after it because the historical data of that block has been changed.

Rahat: And when you do that, when you start trying to like go in into mind, every single thing that comes after it. It's pretty hard to do that, especially on like a larger block block blockchain, because someone's going to catch you. Someone's going to see, wait, why are you, you know, going back in time you know, changing this data and reminding everything afterwards, that's what makes this like pretty secure and like taking that to like another level beyond that, the distributed blockchain, what I was mentioning before is like, when there's a bunch of different nodes on a network, so these are all you can picture as different nodes.

Rahat: These are all different peers, peer a peer B, and B your seat. They all have a copy of the very same blockchain, right? So if I were to go in here and add my name and mine, everything that comes after that, yes, you know, these are all valid now, but the thing that. This has my name, but pier B and PRC do not have my name.

Rahat: So what is the actual valid data on the blockchain? It will be what the consensus is. The consensus shows from peer BNP, RC, that the data is blank and does not contain my name. So this on puree is not valid data on the blockchain because it does not agree with the consensus overall of the entire blockchain.

Rahat: And that is kind of like V at a very core level, how a blockchain works.

Rahat: So going back, how do we interact with the blockchain? Right. There's a couple things that we need to do in order to actually interact with the blockchain generally on, let's say blockchain, like the Bitcoin blockchain or Ethere blockchain you'll need a wallet. It's not a wallet in a traditional sense.

Rahat: Like, yes, it'll show you kind of like how much cryptocurrency you might own or how many assets you own in a certain bar in a certain chain, but wallets, what they really do are they give you like a key value pair of like a public key and a private key that publicly is like your address. It's how everyone identifies you on the blockchain.

Rahat: But the private key is what allows you to actually interact with the blockchain. See what exists on the blockchain that is associated to you, that you. So one use case of the blockchain is to have cryptocurrency, which is, I think one of the questions that came up, the blockchain is a distributed ledger.

Rahat: And what we can do is like, essentially keep track of, you know, different transactions, different coins and things that like get transferred between people. Like if I have one Bitcoin, I wish I had one Bitcoin. But, or if Darren has a Bitcoin or two, you know, and he gives me one or I give him one, all of that is trend.

Rahat: All of that is like, kept track of on the blockchain and is associated to our addresses. So that's a wallet in a nutshell, in my opinion, the wallet is very incorrectly named. It should have been called something like a passport or something or a key, because that's what it really is.

Rahat: It's just a key to the blockchain that shows you the assets that you own that live on the blockchain, not on the wallet. So that's a wallet. And there are a couple of things we can do with wallets, transaction-based interactions. Every time you interact with the blockchain, if you add some data, delete some data, whatever you do manipulate some data.

Rahat: What you're doing is called a transaction. And every transaction that changes the blockchain in some way costs some amount of money to actually use. And those are gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain, the way that's calculated is that there's like a base fee, plus like a tip that you would give to like the miner who is mining that transaction for you and validating that on the blockchain.

Rahat: And because we have this like, system of like rewarding people who are validating all the information. This is what makes this, this incentivizes them basically to like, keep these nodes running in a distributed manner, all across the world. And keep the data and everything valid.

Rahat: Last thing is called signing and approving transactions. This doesn't really cost money on the Ethereum blockchain which is mainly what I'm going to be talking about today. If there's an EVM based, which means if they're in virtual machine based blockchains what you can do is like sign or approve different transactions.

Rahat: So let's say I'm trying to sign into like a website and I want to use like, signing with theory, I'm signing with my wallet rather than. Doing a transaction that costs actual money. What I can do is like use a crypto graphical hash from my wallet to prove that, you know, it's me, who is actually interacting with the blockchain and we can use that hash value from a blockchain to like approve, you know, you signing into an, a decentralized application to approve maybe you, wanting to do several transactions or anything like that.

Rahat: And the cool thing with this is just like, this is not like a really awesome way of like one, one really fun use case of this is just like logging into a website using Ethere using your wallet. This it's like an actual true single sign on experience that you can like take across any number of decentralized applications because you don't have to create a new username account.

Rahat: You don't have to like. Use a single sign on from a company like Google or Facebook or whatever. It's just a single sign on thing that you own, it's associated to your private key, and you know, kept track of on the blockchain. And it's like an identity that you can use across any application that is built on top of that blockchain.

Rahat: Cool. So quick history lesson right now. I know people don't really like history, but it's important to know some of this stuff. So how did all this, like blockchain stuff kind of start a little bit? In January of 2009, Bitcoin was created by someone who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto. That is not this person's real name.

Rahat: No one knows who this person is. If they exist, it could be me. I dunno, it could be Darren. We have no idea. They never actually revealed themselves. But Bitcoin was kind of built out in response to the 2008 financial crisis. And it was just like at a time where a lot of people were kind of questioning, like, do we want big central banks really controlling all of our finances?

Rahat: Do we want it in the hands of the government? Can we create something where it's more distributed where, you know, it's not owned by one single entity? So I definitely recommend re-checking out and reading the Bitcoin white paper to learn more about that. It's a very dense read, but you know, if you can get through it, there's a lot of awesome information.

Rahat: Fast forward, July, 2015, the Ethereum blockchain was created by metallic Buterin. So Batalla is an actual real person I've been in his vicinity a couple of times, but never actually got to talk to him. But overall he's a cool dude. He created the Ethereum blockchain and the main difference between like Ethereum and Bitcoin is like, while Bitcoin kind of serves mainly like a financial purpose, if the room was kind of designed for like all sorts of different applications.

Rahat: Yes. Finance is like probably the biggest application, but you can, if they're going to became this blockchain that you can actually build applications on top. And we're going to take a look at a little bit of that in a little bit. But beyond July, 2015, if you go into August, 2015 into the present, there've been ongoing improvements happening to the Ethereum blockchain in the form of what are called, you know, RFCs, requests for comments and different standards that were created and kept track of essentially like we wanted like a standard for how to create a token, how to create an NFT, how to go about doing specific things rather than reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Rahat: And these standards were saved as like contracts or smart contracts, which is basically solidity code, which is the code that runs on an AVM blockchain like Ethereum and this is one popular place to like look up these contracts it's called open Zeplin, opens up Lynn houses, a whole bunch of these contracts.

Rahat: So you can like, if you wanted to like build your own token or your own NFT, you can actually go and you know, leverage existing code. That's been battle-tested and everything and proven and build on top of that. Now, an issue kind of like with Ethere is the fact that like, if we go back to talking about those gas fees, those gas fees can go up astronomically sometimes.

Rahat: Especially when there's like a lot of congestion on the blockchain when there's a lot of people using it, around last year, In the, in the summer when like the NFT craze was kind of like an all-time high, gas fees were like two, 300 bucks sometimes. And if you were trying to do something like deploy a contract onto the Ethereum blockchain, like one of the first contracts I ever tried to create and deploy in the blockchain, it showed me that it was going to cost like a thousand bucks to do it because when I was trying to do it, it was at the same time that several high profile NFT collections were minting.

Rahat: And I was like, no, this I can't, I can't do this. So in response to that, A bunch of solutions started popping up. These are called like layer two solutions. The company I work for polygon is one of those solutions. We offer like kind of a lot of different, scaling solutions to like build on top of Ethereum.

Rahat: And one of the ones that I'll be talking about today is like our proof of stake, blockchain, which is like fully EVM compatible. There's a whole bunch of other solutions that you can look into, but, you know, if you ever wanted to like develop on the blockchain and get something out, you know, on the, on the actual, like real blockchain, highly recommend polygon because you will play a fraction of the cost.

Rahat: That's on Ethere but everything you do on Ethereum is fully compatible with polygon, but for today's focus, we're going to kind of look at NFTs tokens and just like tools to help us kind of build and get started into my pre space. So I mentioned tokens a lot, right. Well, and some of the words I mentioned were like fungible and non fungible.

Rahat: What does that mean? You can, let's start with fungible, fungible. Our assets were like a, like for like value exits. So if I have one USD, and let's say Darren has one USD and we, we, we trade our, we trade our dollar bills with each other. We didn't actually like, you know, exchange any difference of value.

Rahat: He has a dollar, I have a dollar we traded, we still each have a dollar. Right. And you can look at fungible tokens as just being, you know, like for like value. Bitcoin is a fungible token. Ethereum is a fungible token, MADEC which is on the polygon network. That's our cryptocurrency is a fungible.

Rahat: What is a non fungible token or NFT is something that is unique, where there is not a like valued asset. So you can think of it kind of like the Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa exists inside of a museum. You can go, you can see it, you can take pictures of it. You can print out pictures of it. You can buy a copy of it from like the gift shop and all that.

Rahat: But in all of those cases, you don't own them on Elisa. It's still a thing that exists inside of the museum and is owned by whoever owns it. I'm not sure how that works, but. So essentially, you know, the Mona Lisa is there. You can take a screenshot, take copies of it, but it's not yours. And NFC, NFCS kind of worked the same way.

Rahat: Whereas like, you might have an image, on the blockchain, something, you know, there's like a receipt essentially that says you're the owner of this image. People can take screenshots of it, download it or whatever, but you're the only. You are the person who associated to this, you might own the IP.

Rahat: If that's how the NFT was, you know, set up, you might not, it might still be part of the artists. So those are all things that you have to like look at when you're admitting NFTs, but what does an NFC overall look like the most popular, implementation of an NFT, something you all might be familiar with or like these profile picture type projects, things like board apes, ether, rocks, board, apes, and rocks, these pictures of apes and rocks that cost like millions of bucks, which still blows my mind sometimes.

Rahat: And this is just like really one type of NFT. This is not encompass all of what NFTs are, but you know, there there's these listings, where you can actually, you know, by. these images, these NFTs, you usually buy it with Ethere and what you can think of it as like you're exchanging your crypto for a collectible, right?

Rahat: You're exchanging some crypto for maybe like a super rare Pokemon card or something like that. It's a specific collectible that exists on the blockchain. But at the end of the day, like I said, NFTs are just data. These are receipts that point to a store of data, the store of data can be an image.

Rahat: It can be a video, which I'm going to show you in a little bit. It can be pretty much anything you want to. So that leads us kind of into like use cases for NFTs mentioned the profile pictures. That's one of those use cases. Next up is like a ticketing system. Right? One of one thing that people have been kind of experimenting with is like, can NFTs be a ticket to like a show to an event.

Rahat: When you have a ticketing system that's on the blockchain, what that does is like it deters, scalpers quite a bit or at least scammers because you can't, because if you have the ability to look at a ticket and verify that it is legitimate on the blockchain, you know, you, you can't really sell a fake ticket, right?

Rahat: You can't like go outside of a stadium and like buy, you know, a fake ticket from some dude who's just like, you know, giving you something, he printed out of his computer. And you know, that that's, that's a use case of NFTs that. Find pretty cool. Another use case that kind of being worked on doesn't really exist yet or like deeds for a home, you know, how do we verify ownership, you know, of a home?

Rahat: If like public records aren't the best or anything like that, you know, blockchain is a good a way to do that. There's a lot of people kind of like working in that area to make that a reality. Next up is like fundraising and ownership. Fundraising via NFTs can look like, you know, you're buying, maybe you're buying some of those, you know, profile picture, NFTs and what that.

Rahat: What you get in exchange for that is like maybe some bit of governance rights in that specific project. And this leads into something that's called a Dow or a decentralized autonomous organization. What these organizations are, is just like, you can maybe buy some tokens, whether it be fungible, tokens, or NFTs, and holding that token gives you some sort of voting or governance right inside of that organization.

Rahat: So not only do you buy and like contribute to the fundraising of that organization, you gonna have partial ownership where you can like actually steer the way that they're doing certain things and vote on different things. Kind of like a shared. One of my favorite use cases for an NFT is like an access pass.

Rahat: I actually bought this NFT awhile ago for this project called the rare blocks. And when I bought that NFT, what it gave me access to was just like a bunch of designers who are constantly churning out UI design kids. So like if I ever had a side project or something, I can just go in and then these are designs and UI kits that have commercial rights for as long as I own that NFT.

Rahat: So I can have lifetime access to it. I can build stuff from it. And if I decide that I don't really need it from needed anymore, I can resell it to someone else, you know, maybe make a profit off of it or anything like that. And that's been like a really cool use case, in my opinion. So before we go into the next part, I did want to kind of give you an idea, a little bit of like, how NFTs don't necessarily have to be images.

Rahat: So I meant, I, this is my profile under this website called open C open C is just like this sort of place you can like search up NFTs by them. Check, like what NMT is you own? So these are just like some that I own, I'm going to go to this one that I minted and you'll see here. It's just like a video instead of just a profile picture.

Rahat: So this, this was just like me rapping and like introducing myself as like a developer advocate at polygon. And I just put that on the blockchain because why not? And just kind of just like shows you like. It doesn't have to be a profile picture. It can be a video, it can be music. You can even like do a whole HTML file and like put that on the blockchain.

Rahat: Right? So you can have like a whole website, that's an NMT. Like there's a lot of different things we can experiment with it. And right now the main use cases of entities that you kind of see in the wild are really just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more that kind of like comes, comes up after that.

Rahat: So we head back to our presentation. Now, you know, a little bit about NFTs, you know, a little bit about tokens, how do you start building? Where can you go? First thing is like understanding the languages that are good to know, and like the overall web three space, first off is solidity super important for EVM based blockchains like Ethere like polygon and others in this space.

Rahat: Solidity is what's going to help you, you know, write the smart contracts that can be executed on the block. The other two languages that are pretty good to know are JavaScript and Python. Many of the tools that exist in the web 3d space that like are there to help you build and, you know, get stuff onto the blockchain are built with Java script they're Java script based tools.

Rahat: So. In my opinion, JavaScript is definitely an all purpose language, kind of like good to know, especially in the web three space. Another option is Python. There are an increasingly large like increasing number of tools that are also built in Python. So Python is another option. If Java script isn't really your gym, but you know, none of these are all completely necessary.

Rahat: There are different journeys and different ways you can get into the web 3d space. The thing is like, you know, traditional, I guess web two or development is still needed in the web three space. It's not like we're not just getting rid of websites. We're not just getting rid of like node servers and things like that.

Rahat: A full-stack development is still a thing that is necessary in web three. You know, and you know, if you want to get into. A front end engineer. Like my very first web three job was as a front end engineer. That's what my background was in. And I went to a web three company as a front end engineer and just like, sort of learning more about what three incivility kind of like after the fact.

Rahat: So. If you know, the languages, what are some tools that are helpful for you, for you to explore some common tools? One of my favorites is hard hat, a hard hat is a development environment for writing, testing and deploying smart contracts. If you're a JavaScript developer, this is available as an NPM package.

Rahat: And what hardhat will help you do is essentially like scaffold out some boilerplate code for you to start writing your own solidity, smart contracts and everything like that. And just help you with, you know, writing and eventually deploying it onto the blockchain as well. If you don't want to like set up a whole environment through hardhat, another good way to do.

Rahat: Just go in and start writing solidity code is using the remix IDE.This is like an online ID for writing and deploying smart contracts right out of your browser. This was built by the Ethereum foundation. And it's pretty cool. You can just go in, it works very similarly if you've ever used like vs code or anything like that, it's just in your browser and specifically for solidity code, some other like libraries and tools, especially for folks who are like, kind of like front end developers, that if you want to look into our ether JS web three JS and the wagon, the library, these are tools that will help you like interact with the blockchain from your front end.

Rahat: Definitely recommend taking a look at some of these. If you do want to dive in and learn more, highly recommend checking out the polygon academy, that's academy.polygon.technology. We have a lot of tutorials, a lot of different journeys you can take on like, learning more about blockchain development, as well as like some of the different tools in the space.

Rahat: Cool. And I'd love to now kind of open it up to questions. I do see some questions and here that I can start off with. Yeah, no, thank you so much.I can help with the, with the question, the answer part. Feel free to keep talking to questions in the Q and we have, yeah, I don't think we're going to be in danger of running out of time soon, so yeah.

Darren: Feel free to keep asking. The first question, I'm going to start from the top, the first question from Liz. What is difference between blockchain and cryptocurrency? Yeah, so I think the main thing to note about, like, I guess, blockchain cryptocurrency, a cryptocurrency is one specific use case of blockchain technology.

Rahat: So if we look at blockchain as being like a ledger, like a distributed ledger for us to keep track of transactions, we essentially keep track of like cryptocurrency on the blockchain. Like what I was kind of mentioning before of like, you know, if you know, we each have a Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, and we're trading coins, all of that is tracked on the blockchain.

Rahat: So blockchain technology includes cryptocurrency, but it's not like the all new use case. Okay, thank you. Emily asks, how would you recommend keeping up with Ethereum standards as they're published? Yeah, one of those sites is opens up Lynn. I'll actually grab that link for everyone, but opens up, houses, a lot of those, standards, you know, as they are kind of built as they are released.

Rahat: And a lot of like for example, if you were to create like an NFT project, there is a standard for creating an FTS called ERC 7 21, I believe. If you wanted to like build your own NMT collection, What would be recommended is that like you start off with that base contract, that's available on a place like opens up Upland and that automatically gives you a lot of functionality, like, you know, minting and NFT transferring, tracking who owns it, because a lot of those functionalities is just like, you don't want to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

Rahat: Exchanges like open SI have like a specific way of like tracking these. So we want to make sure that there's a standard way of like, you know, building these tokens, building these entities. So that's why something like opens up land exists to have like all of these standard contracts that you can build on top of.

Rahat: So you're not reinventing the wheel. And so you're making sure that like your code is kind of like compatible with all these large exchanges.

Darren: The next question is, is there is a platform for creating or trading empties for traditional currency. You know, it's not a theory, more other cryptocurrency. Yeah. Is that thing for traditional currency? So I'm assuming like Fiat currency. I would say, I mean, there are, what's called, stable coins.

Rahat: Stable coins are essentially are like it's crypto currency that is pegged to the value of like some Fiat currencies. So, let's say there's there, there's a coin called the U S DC, which essentially is equal to one us dollar. Right. I think that's the closest that you'll probably get to like traditional currency.

Rahat: But at the end of the day, it's, it's, it's still a crypto token. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Did not know about that. The USD coin, Devin has, okay. MTS can only be digital, right? Like, so for example, can you own a house as an empty the thing? Yeah, I would say, people are trying to make it so that, you know, NFTE skin, like do correspond to something in real life.

Rahat: There are a lot of experiments going on with like buying land in the metaverse, where you have like some virtual plot of land. It could even be corresponding to some real life, bit of land. And you buy that with some crypto. Right now it only exists in these like virtual, augmented reality, like environments, but you know, If policies and governments allow, then eventually, maybe that can correspond to something in real life.

Rahat: But as of now, not really, I know some companies have like experimented with like doing Mertz drops, via NFTs. Like you would buy an NFT and you would like, you know, be able to claim some merchant. Like I have a hoodie, that I claimed after buying NFT. But the thing with that is like, if someone buys that NFT off of me, like you have to trust that I will send them that hoodie, you know?

Rahat: So it's like, I don't know if you know, that would be something that really works out in terms of like real life. But, there are people experimenting with that kind of thing. Interesting. Okay. And Anna asked to clarify how an artist retains their ownership, right. To the art inside. Yeah. T thank you. Yeah, so that all depends on when you set up the project.

Rahat: So there are projects out there like the board aid collection is an example of this, of like where, if you own the NFT, you also own the intellectual property of that specific character or whatever. And it depends on the NFD project and what they decide to allow you to own. So that's all kind of decided as like, in like terms of conditions or whatever, and some like legal stuff that, you know, W I, I don't quite understand, but it's decided on like the inception of that you know, project.

Rahat: Do you want the artists to retain ownership? If so, then you would just specify that, like, you know, if you buy the NFT, you don't own the IP, the artist still retains ownership. One like really nice to use case of like making sure that artists are like continuously compensated is that, on exchanges, like open seat, what you can do is actually specify, like a royalty amount.

Rahat: And like whenever you like resell the NFT to someone else, the artists gets like a kickback from that sale. So it could be like maybe. 2%, 3%, six up 6% of that sale, goes back to like the address of the artists who originally created that piece. And it's a way for like, you know, during those resells for that artist to make additional income, rather than just like, you know, a one and done kind of deal.

Darren: Okay. Becky asked, can anyone in the world just get a wallet? Yeah. We can actually show you right now, how to create a wallet. Let me reshare my screen real quick.

Rahat: So I have this wallet here. It's called meta mask. Sorry, let me go over here. And you know, this, this is just the wallet I created. Meta mask is one specific type of wallet. I could just look up men and mass.

Rahat: It exists as like a browser extension. So if you go to ms.io, it'll like detect what browser you're on and let you know that to download. You can like I'm on Chrome. So it's letting me install a Medimap for Chrome. I think it also works for like safari. I'm not 100% sure about safari, but it works on Firefox opera or whatever.

Rahat: It'll detect like, whatever browser you're on and prompt you to install. In my case, I could just install a Chrome extension, which I have a PR already. But essentially, once you create a, once you like install the extension, it's a pretty simple kind of like signing up for a website. Yeah. Instead of setting up your website, you're signing up to create a wallet, through men, a mask and men, a mask will like take you through the steps.

Rahat: It takes like literally 30, 30 seconds to a minute of like generating a key value pair for you. That becomes your wallet. When you create a wallet, you'll get what's called like a seed phrase, which is like 12 to 16 different words. It's very important that if you're going to be doing like some serious, trading or holding of like cryptocurrencies on your wallet that you keep that safe.

Rahat: And you'll never share that with anybody because you share that with someone they can get full access to your wallet, full access to like whatever, you know, cryptocurrencies or stuff that you own. So it's very important to keep that in a very safe, private place. There's not really a lot to wallets.

Rahat: It kind of, you know, exists as a place where you can see like different assets you own. In the case of massive, really just shows tokens. And not my NFTs. Certain wallets exist that like show you not only your tokens, but your wallets as well. What I use on my mobile phone is called the rainbow wallet, which is one of my favorite ones.

Rahat: Got a really good UI and everything. It shows not only my tokens, but also my NFTs and everything like that. It's a really cool mobile wallet to check out to. All right. Okay. Next one, J okay. I think, I think he's cushioned us split in two parts. So a J as a, I'm interested in explore applications using LFTs and smart contracts or transferring deeds and getting loans.

Rahat: How would that work from your point of view and experience? Do you have any thoughts. Yeah. In terms of loans, there's a lot of like existing, smart contracts that exist, that handle that. There are, essentially if you look at protocols like Ave, that's AA V E a of a, let me grab that of a, is like a very popular, Protocol for like earning interest, borrowing assets and things like that.

Rahat: Basically giving loans and earning money on like, giving loans. But the way that it works is like you would stake some amount of crypto as like collateral. And then based on how much you put up as collateral, you can get a loan of a certain amount of crypto. And, you know, it kind of works similar to like a traditional loan.

Rahat: You'll have like an interest rate that you'll have to pay back, et cetera. And you can use that loan to do, you know, whatever it is you need to do. In terms of transferring deeds, that's something that's very, very experimental. Doesn't quite exist in real life just yet. Or at least I haven't seen like a very good implementation of it.

Rahat: But if you look at dates, like at the end of the day, deeds are just like this record, right. That exists on some database or like on some like, cities, city, public record or whatever. You know, if we move that to like a blockchain or whatever, it becomes like a lot easier to access those records verify those records.

Rahat: And you cut out like I think blockchain has the potential to like cut out a lot of like the bureaucracy and nonsense that goes around like you know, buying real estate and things like that. It's gonna take some time to really like, Get through policies and things to get in there, but I think there's a good, there's a good use case in real estate for blockchain,

Rahat: Kilter is rusty important to know for the I assume. I mean, rust is definitely something you can learn. a lot of, you know, if you're kind of like wanting to go like a little bit deeper than like just smart contracts and like really building on like the blockchain and like the deeper protocol level, rust is definitely a good language to know.

Rahat: you know, there are other blockchains that use rust a lot. I think a salon, a blockchain is one of those. so yeah, rust is definitely, you know, another way of like getting into the blockchain space. Okay. What are some where, where are some great educational resources for learning walks through as a front engineer, as a front end engineer?

Rahat: so that that's, very, very good question. I've actually, I was actually like before starting polygon, trying to build some of those out there's as a front end engineer, it's a little bit difficult to find a lot of resources, for, you know, diving into the web three space. what I can say is like the main things as a front end engineer, you'd probably want to know really it's just like the, the, the basics, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, what, some of the big, biggest.

Rahat: Like the, one of the more popularly used frameworks is, is react in the wet 3d space, a lot of tools, that are made for web three, for like interacting with the blockchain are react based tools and like optimize really for react. if you look at like any like different listings for web three jobs, majority of them won't watch it in a react or next JS or something like that.

Rahat: so definitely, you know, if you want to get into a web three as a front end engineer, it's very easy just to leverage your existing skills, for, you know, Building you eyes, things like that. Because at the end of the day, a decentralized application still needs a front end, still needs, you know, a way to interact with everything in a nice way on the internet.

Rahat: So all of your regular, learning resources for, you know, front end is still going to apply. And I would just look into like learning specific libraries that help you interact with the blockchain. Some of those are like some of the ones I mentioned, like ethers JS, the wagon MI library, and web three JS are all good tools to look into.

Rahat: Thank you, Mark Jackson, what do people use for mobile dev typically react native flutter natives. I don't even have any experience with that. Yeah, I'm not too experienced on the mobile. Dev side. I know that react native has like a lot of tooling being built just because like, react is popular in the blockchain space.

Rahat: a lot of the tools are also trying to be ported over for react native. So I think react native is probably a good place to start if you want to do like mobile, blockchain development. like I think like even rainbow wallet, I believe is a react native application. so many of the wallets that are kind of like popular out there are built on react native, but there's definitely still like, you know, native Java, swift development that's useful.

Rahat: At the end of the day mobile development or web development, they, they stay the same. whether you're in web two or three, whatever, it's really just like the libraries and tools that help you access the blockchain that are things you need to learn. Yeah, makes sense. Glen, would it be an email?

Darren: I think I was just sensitive that, so, so the recording of this will be made available, after I do a little bit edits, either later today or five by next Monday. when you turn to the link STO rod, I don't know if you're, if there are concerns or either you or polygon as for, if you were to share your slide deck with some of the, some of the links and resources.

Darren: Okay. Yeah, I think we can chat afterwards and that can, that can put down the page or something. okay, good. Yeah. So hopefully, hopefully that helps, Mark Jackson again, what's the difference between other L two scaling chains, optimism and arbitrary English as polygon? Yeah, I think, so things like optimism and arbitrage them, are very similar to like one of our products, which is like our.

Rahat: probably the polygon blockchain or the proof of stake blockchain. I think the difference really with polygon and these other changes really just like the polygon blockchain is not the only, I guess, solution or product we offer. there are a multitude of different, layer, two solutions that work on developing and are coming out later this year, for, in terms of like stuff that are called like Zika roll-ups, which is a way of, you know, scaling on top of the Ethereum blockchain and that going into that is like a whole other workshop.

Rahat: But just to give you an idea. Yeah. In terms of polygon, we have like a whole suite of different tools, whereas something like, optimism or arbitrary is like focused on like sort of like a, another chain that's like kind of like built on top of it. Okay, thank you. Nevine how much does it cost to learn or try blockchain, excluding courses, any free sandbox?

Rahat: I know you mentioned a few earlier resources, but yeah. Anything else then that comes to mind? Yeah. So like if you're, you know, building on the blockchain, you know, like I mentioned, a lot of the things that interactions, you know, take, you know, transactions, even if you're building on the polygon black chain, there's like small transactions, you still have to do.

Rahat: If you wanna like start building, you know, for free, you can do that. so rather than building on like the main polygon network, you can build on top of like a test networks. So I can. Send some resources on that as well. Both Ethere as well as polygon have different tests networks where you can like actually request, like test funds.

Rahat: So like test tokens, to like run different, you know, maybe you want to like test out minting and NFT. Maybe you want to build your own token. and you can do that all in like a test network. So you don't have to like use actual real money to do so. Like there's a lot of different free resources.

Rahat: I'll include the academy link again. But another one is a learn web three Dow. They're pretty good free resource for like learning, different things. There's another learning results called pointer, GG, where, you know, you don't have to pay for anything, but you can actually learn stuff and get paid.

Rahat: You can do different exercises and earn some small amount of crypto for like, you know, completing things on there, which is a cool way to start learning. it's called like a learn to earn sort of like protocol or whatever. And another one that I used a lot is like built space is a cool place to start learning.

Rahat: They have like different projects. You can do little cohorts where you can like hack away at projects with other people. and yeah, those are all like all those are free. I highly recommend, you know, just kind of sticking to the free material because the free material that's out there is actually very extensive and very, very good.

Rahat: You don't need to pay anything to start. Yeah, it's awesome that you can actually earn a little bit too, because first I've heard of it. That's cool. Hey Christian, what makes what's three different from what two? I know it's supposed to be decentralized, but could you explain to this concept further?

Rahat: Yeah. I don't think we're, you know, we're, we're not completely at a place where everything is decentralized yet. just because, you know, the technology is still very early, very new and still, you know, under active development. But, the way I try to kind of like conceptualize, this is just like, like say social media, just for an example, like, there's this protocol called the lens protocol, which is very new, only came out and I think like a mother two ago.

Rahat: But you can build on top of it and try to build like, Kind of like a social media type primitives. and one of the main key things here is just like, you know, in traditional, like I guess, web to, you know, a lot of the data, you know, everything is of, there's like a hidden cost to using it, like your data, your usage of like Facebook, Google, or anything like that, all that data is tracked.

Rahat: And you know, that data can be used sold to like other parties, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the news, how a lot of that data has been misused and things like that. What we're trying to achieve in web three, and we're not there yet not saying it's happened. But what we're trying to build here is just like, you know, what, if you have this social media platform or like the social media primitives that you can build on top of where, you know, Our user owns their own data.

Rahat: Like if I have followers on Twitter, if I have data on Twitter, that only exists on Twitter, I can't take that anywhere else if I don't want to be on Twitter anymore. But if you build using something like lens protocol where like maybe your, some of this data is, you know, exists on the blockchain, now, it doesn't matter if like, you know, I don't want to be on Twitter anymore.

Rahat: I can remove my stuff from Twitter, go to Facebook or go to LinkedIn or whatever. That's because those platforms no longer own my data. I own my data. Those platforms are just reading my data from the blockchain. Right. and that's where you come. That's like I guess like just sort of like an example of decentralization where like no one entity can like, you know, sensor your data or like, you know, own your data or, or do anything malicious with it.

Rahat: Because it's only you who owns it based on like a couple of like those, you know, private and public keys. and you can choose to move your data for platform. Great. So I know we're nearing the end of the schedule and time. so I think just to be respectful of everyone's time, let me just grab one or two more questions and then we'll wrap up.

Darren: Okay. Yeah, this is, I think this is from the events and closest, or this is the highest record of questions, which is, expert in, so I, I'm not sure how to pronounce that, that name, but let's say if I have five years, five plus years as a developer, and I want to get a blockchain related job.

Darren: Should I just go ahead and start applying? Or should I first try, let me solidity and how long can that take to get a grasp of solidity? Assuming I have solid foundation work programming already. Yeah. I mean, I got my first job in web three without knowing too much solidity. I had like a decent understanding of it.

Rahat: Going into web three, knowing solidity is just like one. Path you can take, right? It's like if you want it to be a smart contract developer specifically, or, you can, you know, learn solidity and go ahead and do that. But you know, you, there are still front end engineering jobs.

Rahat: They're still full stack engineering jobs. So like, Like, if you have five plus years as a developer, you can go ahead and start probably applying. Web three companies will absolutely love you, and probably want to hire you right away because there's definitely a shortage shortage of engineers in this space.

Rahat: Lke, you know, look for web three protocols that, you know, use the languages that you're well versed in. If you're a front end engineer and you know, a lot of Java script or whatever, go for those types of jobs, in the web three space, if you're more backend, you know, Java and all that stuff, look for more backend type roles, all of those roles still exist in them.

Rahat: I have three, like they, they, they haven't gone away. Like it's not replaced by solidity. Solidity is just an additional tool that's there aand additional thing that you can use in the space, but JavaScript, Java, like all, all those, all those like existing things still exist in. Okay. Awesome. Let me grab it.

Rahat: Yeah, just grab the next one. It's the last question. Sorry, everyone. So Vincent, is there a process or a tool to audit a blockchain project? Yeah. there's there, there are services where like, you know, there are third parties who audit smart contracts, before like getting those deployed.

Rahat: So like, as an example, I, you know, I worked on an NFT project a little while ago and after I created the smart contract for that entity project, You know, our founder then sent that contract to be audited by a third party. and that's actually like a whole career path you can take in web three of just like auditing smart contracts, just like checking, making sure that, you know, security issues have been taken care of, that, you know, got gas optimization has been thought through in the code, that, you know, you're not doing anything malicious, you know, you know, as, as the engineer for the smart contract, I could go in and a code that, you know, I get all the royalties and no one else does, you know?

Rahat: For, because of that, like there's this whole like career path called like smart contract auditing that you can look into. And there's a bunch of different companies that do this, a bunch of different tools that can help you with doing that. but yeah, that's like a whole, whole, whole different career path within web three.

Darren: Okay. Yeah. Thanks so much for answering so many, so many questions. I think we'll put it up with a Q and a time and over how, what, what is, what would be like the best way people want to reach out to you and learn more? yeah, I'll put your Twitter on there, but if they're having any preferences.

Darren: Yeah, yeah. Twitter is definitely the best place probably to reach out for any questions. I'm always happy to answer whatever or point you in the right direction. If I don't know. And I'm going to get you started. W me put some relevant links in the chair and let me just make some quick announcements. So yeah, we have the next event, which is quite interesting.

Darren: It's called writing a book venture into other fields in tech as a death. So I don't think it's only applicable to people who wander how to book, but it's, you know, that the speaker is using her experience as writing as like talking about, okay. How, how does tech help you if you want to try out different things?

Darren: So it'd be interesting to check out if you're interested. yeah. And, and the next one the big thing, I think a lot of you know, that we are hosting our first kind of little conference. But it's the biggest thing that I've done so far and it's called the developer growth summit 2022. Sign up if you haven't.

Darren: We actually have. He's one or at least one, maybe even two speakers who would talk about what's the related things. So yeah. It's not as helpful, you know, definitely, definitely check it out. so yeah, it's conceit that links are in the chat. All right. So rod, I just want you to officially thank you again for taking the time, through to share your, your experience and expertise.

Darren: I want to ask if there's any final remarks, I need encouragement that you want to leave for the audience before we go. Yeah. I mean, you know, this, this whole web three ecosystem is still very new. you know, if you're interested in like learning brand new technology that, you know, it doesn't have a lot of documentation that needs a lot of help and, you know, development and you want to get on the ground floor of something, this is pretty exciting path to take.

Rahat: I try to like look past the hype. I like, I don't try to like, you know, Forced it on to be able to say like, this is the future or anything like that. No, this is like a potential future that could happen something that we're trying to build. you know what it might look like in a few years, I don't know.

Rahat: It's pretty exciting just to be at a place where I can like, you know, try to steer it in a direction that I think is good.