Crypto, Blockchain and DeFi - Resources

Hey, half a year late but there were numerous follow requests so I'll do my best. Crypto is getting to the point where you cannot be an expert on all things in it anymore. Within the last two years it has undergone a Cambrian explosion of sorts. The term itself has become deceptive, because it implies a kind of unity, but in fact crypto just encompasses too much for people were able to know everything in it. They did in 2013-2016 or whatever, but those times are over. It moves so quickly that you can hope to have a general knowledge of most sectors, but you can only be particularly honed in a few, because there's too much going on.

You have to have opinions and thoughts on so many things - BTC and its function as money/economic history of currencies, ETH and its relation to scaling/ETH killers, oracles, DeFi, NFTs, shitcoins, Curve wars, DAOs, institutional adoption of crypto, regulation of crypto, crypto gaming, metaverse stuff, and on and on. This is basically impossible even if you work full-time in the sector, which you don't, so it's a question of picking your poison. The rather strange answer I will give you is that what you ideally have is a Twitter account following 200-400 crypto Twitter accounts. Done correctly, this will give you a daily overview of sentiment and updates, and only requires 10-15 mins of scrolling a day or whatever. Furthermore, there are certain sectors of crypto where this is the only place you will find the necessary output, typically cutting edge sectors like Curve Wars. But since you just want a general overview, I'd imagine you might appreciate something a bit more concrete. The Block and Delphi Digital are very good for general overviews of what's happening week-to-week in crypto broadly, so you're already doing very well by following them. Another great one is Bankless - the subscription fee is $22 a month, but it gives a phenomenal general overview several times a week. If you're looking to get started, the a16z canon is a great introduction. For more specific areas you generally need to follow key figures in them on Twitter. The list of sectors within crypto I provided above is not exhaustive, but we can pretend it is and I can provide resources for sectors I didn't mention if anyone asks.

BTC and its function as money/economic history of currencies: Debatably the deepest and broadest of the sectors, there is a truly colossal amount of material that one could recommend. At a basic level, The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous: more concretely, technical explanations of the Bitcoin white paper and a broad understanding of the history of economic thought as it relates to the history of currency (gold standard, gold-exchange standard, fiat standard). You wrote your thesis on this so you're probably quite well versed. In terms of BTC price analytics Will Clemente and Dylan LeClair do good work. For general commentary someone like Nic Carter or Balaji does well.

ETH and its relation to scaling/ETH killers: The only sector in crypto that can compete with BTC in depth. Significantly different to BTC-style readings: much more technical and speculative. The best introductory article on the topic is called Own the Internet: The Bull Case for Ethereum. A warning that ETH really is a hole with no end: it goes as deep as you want it to in both a philosophical and technical sense. In a sentence, ETH wants to be the base layer of the virtual world. What that actually means is a very broad question which can't be neatly summarised. However, in ETH's quest to do this it has become very expensive to use (itself a long debacle) leading to the rise of cheaper alternatives like Solana (SOL) and Avalanche (AVAX). Whether these chains could handle ETH's volume without themselves becoming overloaded is a contentious question. Follows would be members of the Ethereum Foundation, as well as Vitalik himself.

Oracles: Oracles onboard data from off-chain (i.e. the real world) to on-chain (i.e. the blockchain). If a smart contract (an automatically executing if/then piece of code) must trigger upon, say, the successful re-election of Biden, there needs to be a reliable mechanic by which on-chain nodes can verify that this off-chain event actually occurred  in the real world. It's a pretty dead sector for now but will eventually heat up, since oracles are a trillion-dollar solution to certain problems BTC and ETH face. Follow any news related to Chainlink, since it's the main oracle in crypto. Follow Sergey Nazarov, head of the project.

DeFi: Financial protocols on the blockchain, such as loans, interest farming, derivatives, staking (locking your coins for a given amount of time to provide liquidity to the protocol in exchange for a fixed APY return or a given percentage of the fees on the decentralised protocol). A lot of very intelligent people building protocols on the blockchain. Best metrics website is DeFiLlama or DeFiPulse. You need to find some small accounts who happen to be DeFi degens if you want any alpha here.

NFTs: Perhaps the least intuitive to understand if you're not in the space. NFTs are basically a digital version of property: they are property rights on the blockchain. The tired adage about right clicking them being equivalent to owning them fails to appreciate the social signalling aspect of owning a historical/costly NFT. Social signalling is not purely rational, as evidenced by the existence fo Rolexes. NFTs are also on the blockchain, which means that if ETH takes over the Internet, they are essentially property one can move with you. Compare this to the gated nature of Facebook or Valve's Steam marketplace, where collectibles are fixed and cannot be removed from the network. Certain podcasts are good - Overpriced JPEGs is one that comes to mind. Zeneca_33 is a good follow.

Shitcoins: You probably don't want to know much about this, but you need to be in Telegram groups. That's where these are discussed. Not much more to say.

Curve Wars: Niche, cutting-edge sector of crypto designed around maximising Curve fees from Stablecoins exchanges through arbitrage. Curve's governance token is controlled by Convex, making their governance token valuable. The most informed poster on Twitter about this is a guy called Tetranode, but he is very cryptic. Inner circles of powerful whales run the Curve Wars and no-one can get access to those circles without paying their dues for a long time.

DAOs: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, basically groups of people come together to bond around a special interest - say, onboarding people from the third world to Play To Earn games such as Axie - with a treasury they vote on as a group to use on initiatives, salaries, or something else. A quickly developing area. There are a lot of good DAO theorists who have written about the philosophy underpinning them, but to understand it, it's best to join a DAO yourself and just get your hands dirty, such as PeopleDao or whatever.

Institutional adoption of crypto: Basic news tab on Google. tl;dr is that 2021 was the year of institutional adoption and it shows no sign of slowing down. Everyone wants at least a little exposure to crypto. I do not view this trend as particularly likely to reverse.

Regulation of crypto: Basic news tab on Google. This is a topic where rumours occur often but concrete actions rarely, so there isn't much to follow.

Crypto gaming: Re-imagining gaming using crypto, such as in the aforementioned area of using NFTs as non-gated collectibles. The general idea is that certain gaming business models, such as micro transactions, are fundamentally extractive and enrich the producer via harming the consumer. In a web3-integrated/crypto-integrated version of gaming, this would no longer occur - the gamer would actually receive rewards for their attention/playing, not have to pay for the privilege. A good figure here is Arianna Simpson on Twitter, she's involved with a16z's crypto team. Li Jin on Twitter, she runs a large crypto fund. Piers Kicks, a Delphi analyst who focuses in the space.

Metaverse/web3 stuff: The evolution of the Internet from a gated series of communities ran by corporations who extract your data for marketing purposes to a blockchain-enabled Internet where you own your own data and the middleman of the corporation has been removed. If this sounds revolutionary, that's because it is. Chris Dixon on Twitter, head of a16z's crypto team, is the best thinker on the web for this kind of stuff. Carra Wu at a16z. Piers Kicks once again. A lot of niche accounts - Lauren Stephanian, Aaron Wright. Those anonymous accounts being remarkably incisive posters are not the exception but the rule in crypto. At least half of your follows should be anons: many are geniuses.