Jan 17, 2022

Iteration Three - Your Way Into Web 3

By Oliver Jumpertz • Issue #5 • View online

Here we are again. This is the third issue of 2022 and one that is once again fully packed with information for you.

Web 3’s temperature rises every day, and more and more people join the ecosystem. Especially when we look back only a few months, the growth is incredible. Given that, at least seemingly, only a few people were very vocal about Web 3 on Twitter and other platforms, we now see so many of them.

It’s fantastic to see so many aspiring and seasoned developers join the space. More heads mean more brains, and more brains mean more thought power to put into incredible new ideas.

This issue today entirely focuses on giving you a way to get into Solidity, the smart contract language of the Ethereum ecosystem. I hope you enjoy going through it, and I wish you all the best for this incredible learning journey!

Ethereum Smart Contract Developer Roadmap

2022 could be the year you get into smart contract development. The market has a high demand for developers knowing their way around Solidity for Ethereum, and this is why the following roadmap could potentially help you to get your foot in the door.

Without further ado, let’s get into it.

CS50: Introduction to Computer Science | Harvard University

An introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming.

pll.harvard.edu • Share

Depending on where you currently stand in terms of your skills, it might be that you first need an introduction to CS overall.

Harvard offers its CS50 for free, and it’ll take you a while, but it’s worth it.

Learn to Code — For Free — Coding Courses for Busy People

Learn to Code — For Free

www.freecodecamp.org • Share

JavaScript is the basis of many tools in the Ethereum ecosystem. You should know JavaScript relatively well before you get into Solidity later.

Do at least the JavaScript courses here, including quality assurance.

Public Key Cryptography - Computerphile

Spies used to meet in the park to exchange code words, now things have moved on - Robert Miles explains the principle of Public/Private Key Cryptographynote1…

www.youtube.com • Share

At the heart of a blockchain lies public key cryptography. You should understand what it is, how it works, and why what you’ll do later makes sense.

This video is a great introduction.

Cryptography Digital signatures

Cryptography Digital signatures, Digital signatures are the public-key primitives of message authentication. In the physical world, it is common to use handwritten signatures on handwritten or

www.tutorialspoint.com • Share

With cryptography, you can begin to sign messages and verify identities.

This article will give you a better idea of how transactions are initiated, for example, and why that is secure.

What is Hashing on the Blockchain?

What is Hashing on the Blockchain? https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-hashing/Cryptographic hashing is a key feature in the security and efficiency of blo…

www.youtube.com • Share

Hashing is a core concept that blockchains use. And as a smart contract developer, you will probably also use it a lot.

This video is a great introduction to hashing and its use in blockchains.

Blockchain Definition: What You Need to Know

A blockchain is a digitally distributed, decentralized, public ledger that exists across a network. It is most noteworthy in its use with cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

www.investopedia.com • Share

Now that you know what cryptography is actually about, it’s time to learn more about blockchains in general.

The blockchain will be your place of work, so you better know well what you’ll work with.

How does Ethereum work, anyway?. Introduction | by Preethi Kasireddy | Medium

Odds are you’ve heard about the Ethereum blockchain, whether or not you know what it is. It’s been in the news a lot lately, including the cover of some major magazines, but reading those articles…

preethikasireddy.medium.com • Share

Knowing Ethereum is pretty essential, primarily as you work toward being able to code with Ethereum-like blockchains in the future.

When you’re done with this article, you’ll have a general understanding of Ethereum.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Smart Contracts in Ethereum - OpenZeppelin blog

Everything you need to get started with Solidity.

blog.openzeppelin.com • Share

Time to finally dip your toes into the waters of Solidity.

While already a little older, this guide is a great way to finally implement your first Smart Contract.

#1 Solidity Tutorial & Ethereum Blockchain Programming Course | CryptoZombies

CryptoZombies is The Most Popular, Interactive Solidity Tutorial That Will Help You Learn Blockchain Programming on Ethereum by Building Your Own Fun Game with Zombies — Master Blockchain Development with Web3, Infura, Metamask & Ethereum Smart Contractsand Become a Blockchain Developer in Record Time!.

cryptozombies.io • Share

CryptoZombies is a game, but one that teaches you Solidity.

You’ll write more advanced logic in this tutorial and get comfortable with the language.

Time-locked Wallets: An Introduction to Ethereum Smart Contracts

Dive into Ethereum smart contract development with this tutorial. Learn how to create a practical ĐApp, complete with its own ERC20 token, using the Truffle framework and the Solidity language.

www.toptal.com • Share

Time for even more practice.

This tutorial walks you through creating a full dApp, including your own ERC 20 token.

Ultimate Introduction to Ethereum Ðapp Development

A series of videos, covering building your very first dApp.

www.youtube.com • Share

This one is a great video series on dApp development.

Concentrate on the Smart Contract videos, and you’ll get even more valuable practice with Solidity.

Ethernaut

A security-focused game for Solidity developers.

ethernaut.openzeppelin.com • Share

Ethernaut is another game that teaches you Solidity.

This one primarily focuses a little more on security, a topic that will be very important to you as a smart contract developer.

Gas isn’t a token but understanding it can save you money and frustration.

Simple explanation of what Ethereum Gas is and its role in the blockchain. Understanding gas prices can save you tokens and frustration.

ethgas.io • Share

Every line of code you write has an impact on your users.

They pay gas to call functions of your smart contracts.

Time to learn about the what, why, and how of Gas.

Blockchain Oracles, Explained

Ethereum has made possible the creation of DApps - decentralized applications that operate entirely on a Blockchain. These apps can offer some great advantages,…

cointelegraph.com • Share

You won’t be able to do everything on the blockchain.

Time to learn about oracles, a way for Smart Contracts to communicate with the outside world.

Contract ABI Specification — Solidity 0.8.12 documentation

The Contract ABI Specification.

docs.soliditylang.org • Share

Every smart contract has an ABI.

When someone wants to use your contracts, they need to know their ABIs, and you should also know what you actually create there.

Keccak

Basic Presentation for Keccak Understanding.

www.slideshare.net • Share

Keccak is the important hash algorithm for Solidity developers.

You’ll work with it a lot so you better know what you are using there.

Hardhat | Ethereum development environment for professionals by Nomic Labs

Hardhat is an Ethereum development environment. Compile your contracts and run them on a development network. Get Solidity stack traces, console.log and more.

hardhat.org • Share

The time has come to choose the stack you will use from now on.

My recommendation for your development environment: Hardhat.

Sweet tool for smart contracts testing

Sweet tool for smart contract testing, with waffles included.

getwaffle.io • Share

Tests are crucial, especially for Smart Contracts.

My recommendation: Waffle as your testing framework.

Documentation

ethers.js the blockchain client library.

docs.ethers.io • Share

Next to Waffle, you will also need a client library to invoke your contracts.

My recommendation: ethers.js

Build Secure Smart Contracts in Solidity

The standard for secure blockchain applications.

openzeppelin.com • Share

Smart contract development is like traditional development, and you should not try to reinvent the wheel every time.

OpenZeppelin provides many useful standards already implemented.

ERC | Ethereum Improvement Proposals

Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) describe standards for the Ethereum platform, including core protocol specifications, client APIs, and contract standards.

eips.ethereum.org • Share

Ethereum has defined many standards, especially for tokens.

Standardized A(B/P)Is are crucial to making the ecosystem work.

Go through them all, and learn the most important ones, like ERC20, ERC721, etc.

GitHub - fravoll/solidity-patterns: A compilation of patterns and best practices for the smart contract programming language Solidity

A compilation of patterns and best practices for the smart contract programming language Solidity - GitHub - fravoll/solidity-patterns: A compilation of patterns and best practices for the smart contract programming language Solidity

github.com • Share

Now that you can freely build things without a browser, it’s time to build and learn important Solidity patterns along the way.

What’s Next?

You should be a pretty competent Solidity developer by now. Your skills, however, are still pretty general.

From here on, build a lot of stuff, experiment even more, and see what fields you might like. You can definitely specialize from here on.

Look into:

NFTs
Currencies/fungible tokens
DeFi
DAOs

Learn more about all of them, and see whether you like a field specifically.

Another topic you can now begin to research is decentralized computing. You won’t always be able to do everything within your smart contracts (remember learning about Oracles?). Look into Chainlink as a beginning.

Securely connect smart contracts with off-chain data and services

Chainlink is the most widely used oracle network for powering hybrid smart contracts, enabling any blockchain to securely access off-chain data & computations.

chain.link • Share

After that, you can also try to become comfortable with Functions as a Service in JavaScript and such because sometimes, you will have to write code outside of the blockchain. The more you research, the more interesting platforms and applications you will find.

Selected News

Crypto Accepted at San Diego State University | NewsCenter | SDSU

San Diego State starts to accept donations in BTC and ETH…

newscenter.sdsu.edu • Share

The San Diego State University recently announced that it will now accept crypto donations in Bitcoin and Ether after an anonymous alumnus donated $25,000 worth of Bitcoin to their former university.

According to San Diego State, the university will use those donations to help fund crypto-related activities.

Unlike many other universities, San Diego State decided not to convert its first donation into FIAT immediately but instead opted to hold for a little longer. According to representatives, holding the funds is part of their own experimentation to see how the organization will handle crypto in the future.

Shib on Twitter: "Official Statement regarding the recent actions by @CoinMarketCap .… "

Regarding the recent listing of 3 fake SHIB addresses on CoinMarketCap…

twitter.com • Share

On Friday, January 14th, the official SHIB account on Twitter issued a statement claiming that CoinMarketCap had allegedly listed three fake SHIB contract addresses on BSC, Solana, and Terra.

CoinMarketCap responded by stating that the three addresses were, in fact, wormhole addresses, usable for cross-chain transactions (wrapped assets).

Members of the SHIB team haven’t responded to the response yet. Meanwhile, the community slowly arrived on both sides and took one or the other side. As of now, the situation still isn’t fully solved.

A glimpse into Disneyland's future? Disney may one day project 3-D images for individual guests

The Walt Disney Co. has been approved for a patent to project 3-D images on real-world objects in theme parks.

www.latimes.com • Share

Disney (the company that owns Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, and nearly all princesses ever in existence) recently had a patent approved for a virtual-world simulator in a real-world venue. The company claimed it had no current plans to use the technology, it might be seen as an indicator that Disney prepares to upgrades its theme parks with elements from the metaverse in the future.

Stacks Ecosystem Becomes #1 Web3 Project on Bitcoin

/PRNewswire/ – Hiro, the go-to developer tools company for the builders of the Bitcoin economy, celebrates record growth on the one-year anniversary of…

www.prnewswire.com • Share

Stacks is a layer-2 solution for Bitcoin, and it’s one of those projects that adds smart contract capabilities to Bitcoin and also has a thriving NFT market. The company behind Stacks, Hiro, recently reported 350 million monthly API requests, 40,000 Hiro wallet downloads, and 2,500 Clarity smart contracts. This now makes the project the largest Web 3 project built on Bitcoin.

Stacks and Bitcoin might not be as popular as Ethereum and its ecosystem right now, but this size definitely shows that even the Bitcoin ecosystem can become a contender in the global battle about user and developer mindshare.

NEAR Raises $150m from Three Arrows, Alameda, Jump and MetaWeb | NEAR Protocol

NEAR Raises $150M from 3AC, Alameda, Mechanism, Dragonfly, a16z, Jump, Alameda, Zee Prime, Folius, Amber, 6th Man Ventures, Circle, MetaWeb.vc, Alan Howard, Santiago Santos and Aave Founder Stani Kulechov

medium.com • Share

The NEAR Protocol is a direct competitor of Ethereum. The team now announced that it had raised $150 million in seed funding to develop regional hubs and raise awareness for blockchain and decentralized tech.

Rising investments in alternatives to Ethereum show that investors look for other options and believe in a larger competition between the major smart chains. Gas fees on Ethereum are an issue, and there is no clear signal by the Ethereum developers when Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake will finally launch. Until then, with each day going by, more and more investments flow into alternative solutions. It will be interesting to see how the whole space changes over time, with investments into different projects evening out the field little by little.

Helpful Learning Resources

Web3 University - Your Guide to Blockchain Development

The comprehensive educational resource on blockchain development with the most useful tutorials across the web3 ecosystem. Partnering with a16z, Alchemy, Polygon, Pantera, Chainshot, Offchain Labs, and many more.

www.web3.university • Share

Web 3 university is an incredible project that aims at teaching you everything related to blockchain. If the roadmap still isn’t enough for all your thirst for knowledge, this platform hopefully helps you even more.

How the Bitcoin protocol actually works | DDI

How the Bitcoin protocol actually works

michaelnielsen.org • Share

Although Bitcoin is no smart chain itself, it is still the largest blockchain project (by market cap and adoption) on the planet. It was the first of its kind, and it influenced all projects that came after it.

Knowing how Bitcoin works is a must for everyone really interested in blockchain technology, and this article gives you everything you need to know.

Learn how to code elliptic curve cryptography | by Cornelius Schätz | Coinmonks | Medium

In my last article on how to Build a simple Blockchain I wrote about the ultimate basics of blockchain technology and gave you a step by step guide on how to build a simple one on your one. Now I’d…

medium.com • Share

Many developers try to avoid math as much as possible. It is often complicated and unrelated to software development (at least not with all the complex formulas). Cryptography and especially elliptic curve cryptography, lies at the heart of a blockchain. Knowing about it absolutely helps you understand why all this is actually working and why it is secure. This article is an excellent introduction to the topic, and you don’t want to miss it.

useWeb3.xyz · Learn Web3 development

A curated overview of the best and latest resources on Ethereum, blockchain and Web3 development.

www.useweb3.xyz • Share

useWeb3 is another platform that teaches you everything related to Web 3. Its curated resources cover everything, from start to finish. You can choose whatever fits you best, and then pick and take what you like.

GitHub - willitscale/learning-solidity: The companion to the Youtube tutorials

The companion to the Youtube tutorials. Contribute to willitscale/learning-solidity development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com • Share

This repository is a companion to a series of YouTube tutorials. But even without the videos, the content of this repository is still very valid. If you still look to learn more about Solidity, this might be a great learning resource for you.

That's It For This Issue

This issue has now come to an end. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and that you took something worthwhile with you.

As usual, if you have any feedback, feel free to provide it. Even if you have any ideas, share them with me, I’ll do my best to find out how I can incorporate them into this newsletter.

Until then, stay safe, hodl, and go buidl some dApps!

Yours sincerely,

Oliver

Did you enjoy this issue?

By Oliver Jumpertz

Hey, I'm Oliver, and Iteration Three is my newsletter focused on Web 3 and me. One that I would love to get every week.

You will be kept up to date with my content, learn valuable lessons about the space, get to know important news from the space, and much more.

Prepare to get a lot of value into your inbox every Monday, 52 weeks a year.

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