These are core concepts in understanding what a basic blockcahin is and how it works. Without this knowledge you'll struggle.
My goal is to keep this list as short as possible so making sure you go through each resource is pretty important.
- Bitcoin Whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- Understanding Consensus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
- Ethereum and it's short history: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7jj1so/rethereum_i_wrote_this_to_explain_ethereum_in/
- A simple tutorial on how Web3.js works: https://eattheblocks.com/introduction-to-web3-js-1-2-latest-version-beginners-tutorial/
The hardest part of DeFi can sometimes be understanding the finance side of things. It's okay if the concepts take a while to understand but knowing the words can be a good step in the right direction.
Personally, this book was a great primer to understanding finance: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30971680-the-wisdom-of-finance By reading this book you realise finance is actually extremely beneficial for humanity and without it we'd be stuck in the past.
Once you've read that book you'll need to understand what the following concepts mean/work:
- Liquidity
- Fixed/Variable Interest Rates
- Debt
- Collateral
- Leverage
- Margin Trading
- Order Books: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+order+books+work
- Options (maybe)
This will take a while to understand but exposing yourself to these concepts then referring back to them will be helpful.
Basically DeFi is combining the above two sections into one disclpline. You'll often need to refer to the above resources or more to understand certain things.
The best way to learn and get DeFi is by simply using the products by doing the following things:
- Executing a trade on Uniswap. Key things to understand:
- How token approvals work
- How liquidity pools work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui1TBPdnEJU)
- The risk of front-running
- Setting the correct gas price
- Providing liquidity on Uniswap
- What it means to be an LP
- The risks of impermanent loss (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41WVTwmSPng)
- Opening a Vault on MakerDAO:
- What you can do when the price of ETH increases/decreases (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBSnOrakBsQ&t=3s)
- What happens when you get liquidated
- Use cases
- Borrowing DAI on Compound
- How the utlisation ratio works/cost of borrowing
- Collateral/borrowing factor & limits
- Depositing an asset on YFI
- How vaults work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IkRHymMWLM)
- Why they're beneficial & cheaper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuz7Tg57XbE&t=425s)
This is probably the hardest elemnt of all but if you've done the above and understand all the concepts a lot of this will be much easier to grasp.
In order the things you need to understand:
- How a blockchains works
- How blockchain full nodes work
- How to connect to a node
- How to use a library such as Web3.js & Ethers.js to interact with a node
- Building a dApp that reads/writes data on-chain
To better understand Solidity go through CryptoZombies: https://cryptozombies.io/
Some curated tutorials to follow:
- https://www.dappuniversity.com/articles/the-ultimate-ethereum-dapp-tutorial
- https://docs.openzeppelin.com/learn/building-a-dapp
- https://consensys.net/blog/blockchain-development/how-to-fetch-and-update-data-from-ethereum-with-react-and-swr/
Tokens are the heart of the crypto understanding. Understanding how investors think about them & value them are crucial. Also token design is a whole rabbit hole of itself.
Here are a bunch of resources to better understand the thinking around them: