How to get into crypto
The beginner's guide
Primer
Crypto. It’s a word that invokes feelings of mystique, fear and excitement all at once. Maybe you’ve heard about:
Bitcoin on the news and how it’ll replace gold
Ethereum and how smart contracts will replace all agreements in the world
NFTs replacing art and being prime real estate in the metaverse
Avalanche, Solana and Terra as the next generation of smart contract platforms
DeFi replacing traditional finance with its ridiculously high interest rates
Some random teenager investing $100 into Doge and becoming a multi-millionaire
As you can tell from the above, crypto is a multi-trillion dollar industry with many, many avenues to get involved and play in.
In this article, I want to write a starter guide of sorts for anyone new coming into the industry and kind of give a low down of how things work and how you can build your life in this exciting new place in the metaverse.
Common Misconceptions
Before I carry on, I want to take some time to dispel some common misconceptions that people have about crypto so that you can read and ingest this guide with a more open mind and hope! So let’s start tackling those limiting beliefs:
You need to be technical to get involved. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Crypto desperately needs people who can build digital communities, design great products, content creators to educate, connect projects to build partnerships, assist with the operational challenges of running a startup, artists to create NFT artwork and many more. As long as you have a desire to be here, there will always be a place for you at the table. Trust me.
Everything is volatile. A common thing that makes you scared about crypto is that prices fluctuate so wildly that you’re not sure whether all the volatility is something you’re cut out for. Luckily this isn’t true because there are tons of ways to participate in crypto without taking on the problems of volatility. For example, there are certain types of coins called stablecoins which represent 1 US Dollar and keep that value. You can play around with crypto as if it was just an online bank account and choose to stay away from the volatility. Many people working in the crypto industry earn their salaries in stablecoins so it’s not really too different.
What real world use cases does crypto have? A lot of the time people keep asking if crypto will be useful in the real world to pay for things such as coffee. The honest reality is that it probably won’t and it shouldn’t. The thing to understand is that crypto is money for the internet/metaverse. You can bring it back into the traditional financial system but conceptually think of crypto and the existing system as two financial parallel worlds. You can switch money between the two worlds but it comes at a cost and inconvenience due to compliance & regulation. That being said, given the macro trend of us spending virtually all our time online, this new financial system is going to be very important.
Your Adventure
Okay now that we’ve outlined why being involved in crypto isn’t so crazy and that everyone has a place here, let’s talk about the various adventures you can take part in. Each of these adventures are macros themes & sub-niches so the kinds of resources, builders, investors, creators you’ll find will be different. I’ll cover what each of the themes below mean and how you can get involved in them.
DeFi
Likes: loves math, logic, money, game theory, complex abstractions, programming.
Hates: banks, the existing financial system.
DeFi stands for Decentralized Finance. The main idea around this adventure is that you can replace banks and bankers with shadowy super coders. One line of code replaces one employee. By participating in this adventure, you want to create a financial system that’s fair, transparent and accessible to anyone on planet earth. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what your age/race/religion is — you have access to the same financial services.
What’s in it for you:
The ability to use financial instruments only available to elite people in the existing financial system
High yield savings accounts
A job to develop software that manages billions of dollars
Investing in the next big primitive to change the landscape
How you can get started:
Start using all the major DeFi apps
Read everything you can find about on DeFi
Watch plenty of videos about any financial jargon you don’t understand
Keywords to research: Uniswap Protocol, MakerDAO, Yield Farming, Liquidity Mining, Compound Protocol, Smart Contracts, Ethereum.
NFTs
Likes: art, music, collecting rare items, culture, curating quality work
Hates: art and artists being undervalued
NFTs stand for non-fungible-tokens. Since that doesn’t really make sense I’ll explain it in a better way. Normal tokens aren’t unique in the fact 1 Bitcoin = 1 Bitcoin, so it doesn’t really matter which one I own. NFTs are unique tokens where each one represents a unique item. For example, the Mona Lisa is not the same piece of artwork as The Last Supper. They’re different items altogether so they’re non-fungible/non-interchangeable/non-identical. By having cryptographic tokens that represent something uniquely you can now own them in your wallet natively. People are creating NFTs for their art, music or even video game items! NFTs are a large part of what compromises the metaverse.
What’s in it for you:
Sell any artistic work that you have
Speculate on other people’s art/collectibles (looking at you sneakerheads)
Being involved in internet communities with likeminded people
Creating digital experiences through true internet ownership
How you can get started:
Browse through the endless collection of NFTS
Buy your first NFT on OpenSea
List a piece of art you have on OpenSea
Keywords to research: CryptoPunks, Digital Collectibles, Floor Price, NFT Whitelist, NFT Gaming, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Metaverse, NFT PFPs
DAOs
Likes: governance, politics, communities, coordinating people
Hates: corrupt political systems with no flexibility
DAOs stand for Decentralized Autonomous Organisations. Once again, a terrible acronym for a nonsensical phrase — but you know that’s just the crypto way. So the whole idea here is that a group of humans can come together and create a new online entity that acts as one large entity. This entity might be investors coming together to pool funds and create a fund. It could be a bunch of collectors coming together to pool money to create a co-collection of the top NFTs. It could be a group of talented designers and engineers pooling their time together to charge from the DAO. It could be a group of product engineers coming together to build a product and share the revenues with the DAO members. As you can tell from these examples there are boundless DAO opportunities.
What’s in it for you:
Have the chance to created new digital organisations
Experiment with new governance structures
Meet and interact with tons of new interest people working remotely to achieve the same goal
How you can get started:
Get involved in some DAOs (IndexCoop, Olympus)
Go on Snapshot.org and browse through the proposals happening right now
Browse through some forums where the discussions for each proposal happen + learn about the project and its goals!
Keywords to research: Decentralized Governance, Quadratic Voting, Tragedy of the Commons, The DAO Hack, ConstitutionDAO, ENS, Gitcoin
Conclusion
As you can tell from the above, crypto is an incredibly exciting place with many ways to put your talents to use. This is a digital revolution accessible to everyone and everywhere. As long as you have an internet connection and some time then you have everything you need.
This guide isn’t an exact “how-to” guide but rather helps you to understand the high-level landscape and the tools to navigate that landscape. Being able to dig deeper into each of these topics yourself and navigating the absolutely huge amount of information is what you’ll need to learn and spend time navigating.
A few words of advice before you embark on your journey:
Until you’ve spent more than 3-6 months of continuous research on whatever topic you’re deep in, don’t put your money in anything outside of BTC or ETH (not investment advice). In crypto, most people are trying to sell you tokens that they hold/own themselves in subtle ways. Understand the landscape before thinking you’re a genius who will find the next gem.
Don’t expect things to be easy to find or understand off the bat. There’s a reason why the risk/reward ratio is insane, because those that have the perseverance and grit to stick it through are the ones that reap the benefits. If you want something simple/safe then this probably isn’t the right place for you. This is an adventure that you choose.
There is no quick money or easy pathways here. Those who think that are the ones who leave the quickest. You’re not here to just come in, extract and leave. You’re quite literally opening a new chapter of your life when you properly get stuck into this stuff. Be patient and don’t expect the world until you really get deep into the weeds of all this stuff and you’re spending 20+ hours a week researching (bare minimum, 40 is ideal in the start).
That’s about it from me. I’m here to answer any questions you have but what you make of your crypto journey is completely dictated by your interests and attitude.
Don’t chase an end goal, let your curiosity and passion take you to their natural destination.
You already know where you want to be, you just haven’t given yourself time to express it yet.