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The TradFi to Crypto Pipeline-An unaudited introductory syllabus by @VirtualElena
** **These are some of the foundational texts and personal obsessions I discovered while first learning about the world of crypto. I’ve put together a reading list intended mostly for people in traditional finance who are curious about the space. With that in mind, the resources below are mostly focused on stuff like transactions/payments, decentralized finance, dApps, DAOs, and MEV. In the interest of keeping this as slim and approachable as possible, I’ve excluded reading related to NFTs, crypto-gaming, the regulatory landscape. This is not meant to be a comprehensive/prescriptive list -- more so an orientation and catalyst for more exploration. As always, click all the hyperlinks and then DYOR :)
This reading list looks mostly at activity on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. There are also plenty of L1s that you should explore, as they’re beginning to see serious adoption: a list of the top chains by total value locked is available on DefiLlama.
Protocols and smart contracts have source-code available for anyone to view, so you can do a lot of digging and discovery there. There are also countless Discord servers to join, lower-profile tokens and protocols to discover (again...exercise good judgment and DYOR), and plenty of whitepapers to be read. Follow your curiosity.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper (Satoshi Nakamoto) - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Headless Brands (Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, Sam Hart, Brian Lehrer) - a fantastic essay published in 2019 from some of the folks at Other Internet that looks at the emergence of Bitcoin and other decentralized protocols as “Headless Brands” -- in other words, ideas in which every user is a stakeholder and no one individual is the pilot: https://otherinter.net/research/headless-brands/
Plus a fun related thread in the Bitcoin Forum from 2010, illustrating the communal effort to give Bitcoin a “brand” in the form of the now widely-recognized BTC logo: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41.msg238#msg238
** The VCs ask...what’s next?**
I found this sequence of posts from Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon, and Adam Ludwin all published within a few weeks of each other 2014 to be a really interesting harbinger of what kinds of applications would soon arrive, not on the Bitcoin blockchain (as they were envisioning), but on Ethereum (which officially launched in 2015).
The Bitcoin Hype Cycle (Fred Wilson) https://avc.com/2014/09/the-bitcoin-hype-cycle/
Bitcoin Price and Promise (Fred Wilson) https://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-price-and-promise/
Some Ideas for Native Bitcoin Apps (Chris Dixon)
https://cdixon.org/2014/10/04/some-ideas-for-native-bitcoin-apps
Bitcoin’s Killer Apps: A Look Into the Future (Adam Ludwin) https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-killer-apps-look-future
The Ethereum Whitepaper (Vitalik Buterin) https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
A Prehistory of the Ethereum Protocol (Vitalik Buterin)- https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/09/14/prehistory.html
The Meaning of Decentralization (Vitalik Buterin) - https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274
Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency (Fred Ehrsam) - https://blog.coinbase.com/ethereum-is-the-forefront-of-digital-currency-5300298f6c75
** **Blockchain Tokens and the dawn of the Decentralized Business Model (Fred Ehrsam) - https://blog.coinbase.com/app-coins-and-the-dawn-of-the-decentralized-business-model-8b8c951e734f
** **Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design (Chris Dixon) - https://medium.com/@cdixon/crypto-tokens-a-breakthrough-in-open-network-design-e600975be2ef
Progressive Decentralization: A Playbook for Building Crypto Applications (Jesse Walden) - https://a16z.com/2020/01/09/progressive-decentralization-crypto-product-management/
Crypto’s Business Model is Familiar. What Isn’t is Who Benefits (Jesse Walden) - https://a16z.com/2020/04/08/crypto-network-effects/
Scaling - (Ethereum Foundation) https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/
A good introductory orientation on scaling solutions for Ethereum
If you want to read more about Ethereum scaling solutions specifically, the blog “What’s New in Eth2” is a great resource.
** **The Dao of DAOs (Packy McCormick) - https://www.notboring.co/p/the-dao-of-daos
DAO Landscape (Cooper Turley) - https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/_EDyn4cs9tDoOxNGZLfKL7JjLo5rGkkEfRa_a-6VEWw
With these resources, be sure to check the dates. Some of the stats related to things like TVL (total value locked) and revenue may be a bit outdated. For ongoing market data, I recommend looking at sites like:
https://defipulse.com/ (NOTE: I would recommend reading the whitepapers and perhaps more importantly...directly interacting with the protocols on this list with your crypto wallet)
And also look at data available on the sites of many of the protocols themselves, which have constant updates on things like TVL, lending rates, and APYs
DeFi 101 (Uncommon Core podcast with Hasu and Su Zhu) https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Ir4dMAnKWyXVjolNQLJVK?si=d8ccdabcbefe4811
This is a particularly fun intro to DeFi podcast for so many reasons. It was recorded in June, 2020 (right when I was beginning to fall down the crypto rabbit hole and right when DeFi summer was in full swing), and the most striking thing about it is just how nascent the industry was at this point. So nascent, that a lot of this stuff is new to Hasu (...so to hear him learning in real time from Su Zhu is truly cool.). They go through a lot of introductory concepts (decentralized vs centralized exchanges) and round up a couple of the largest protocols today (Uniswap, Compound, Aave, Curve, Synthetix, and MakerDAO). It’s also worth noting that some of the stuff they say is outdated (not their fault, the industry moves fast!). Some of the stuff that happened after the podcast was recorded: at one point, Su remarks that there aren’t any large anonymous DeFi protocols...this changed in August with the launch of Sushiswap. Other things that have changed since the recording include (but aren’t limited to): there are now many synthetic asset products available thanks to protocols like UMA and Mirror Finance; Compound
** **FinTech 3.0 Re-Architecting Financial Market Infrastructure & DeFi (John Street Capital) - https://john-street-capital.medium.com/fintech-3-0-re-architecting-financial-market-infrastructure-defi-b554c634f261
To be honest, one of the best high-level overviews of TradFi/Fintech vs DeFi I’ve ever read.
** **DeFi’s Two Cultures (Graeme Boy) - https://g.mirror.xyz/KJFMrrKHwv2pAygNy3WFEcICSgHISOPn8EWeJYR_YOc
A fun, almost anthropological look at the landscape of DeFi.
** **Crypto Market Structure 3.0 (Arjun Balaji) - https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/10/crypto-market-structure-3-0/
** **So You Want To Use a Price Oracle (Samczsun) - https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/11/so-you-want-to-use-a-price-oracle/
Analyst Brain
If you still haven’t shaken the DCF-tinted glasses that frame your worldview, here are a few good posts that take DeFi protocols and give them the TradFi treatment. None of this is investment advice or endorsement.
How DAOs Should Approach Treasury Management (Shreyas Hariharan) - https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/how-daos-should-approach-treasury
Crypto Banking 101 (Sébastien Derivaux) - https://medium.com/@sebastien.derivaux/crypto-banking-101-ece9f1c2b031
MEV
MEV (Miner Extractable Value or Maximal Extractable Value, depending on the chain/PoW vs PoS) is probably one of the most fascinating crucibles within crypto right now. It’s impossible to understand how a system really works until you understand how people are trying to exploit it -- so if you want to understand how participants on the Ethereum blockchain actually behave, understanding MEV is a good place to start. Depending on who you are (and how MEV is being used), you either think that MEV is a fundamentally destabilizing force, something that attracts developers, capital, and talent to Ethereum, or somewhere in the middle if it’s monitored and mitigated effectively (hence the emergence of the organization Flashbots). Another great thing about Flashbots specifically is that they put out really helpful research on how MEV with dovetail with a number of changes in the Ethereum ecosystem -- e.g. if you want to understand the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, or changes to fee mechanisms like EIP-1559, the lens of MEV will illuminate not only MEV, but the changes to Ethereum in question.
Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges (Philip Daian, Steven Goldfeder, Tyler Kell, Yunqi Li, Xueyuan Zhao, Iddo Bentov, Lorenz Breidenbach, Ari Juels) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.05234.pdf
Ethereum is a Dark Forest (Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos)- https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
** **Escaping the Dark Forest (samczsun) - https://samczsun.com/escaping-the-dark-forest/
Quantifying MEV: Introducing MEV-Explore v0 (Alex Obadia) - https://medium.com/flashbots/quantifying-mev-introducing-mev-explore-v0-5ccbee0f6d02
** **MEV in eth2 - an early exploration (Alex Obadia and Taarush Vemulapalli) - https://hackmd.io/@flashbots/mev-in-eth2
The State and Future of MEV (Hasu, Phil Daian, Dan Robinson, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, Mahimna Kelkar) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3nACF7uVZw&t=17490s
Funnily, they spend the last ~3 minutes or so of this panel comparing controversies re: MEV to Robinhood’s tensions around payment for order flow. What is old is new again, eternal recurrence, etc.
MEV and EIP-1559 (Kristof Gazso & Alejo Salles)
https://hackmd.io/@flashbots/MEV-1559
Thread of MEV-related Tweets - Robert Miller (https://twitter.com/bertcmiller/status/1402665992422047747)
Flashbots Github - https://github.com/flashbots/pm
MEV Explore - https://explore.flashbots.net/
The TradFi to Crypto Pipeline-An unaudited introductory syllabus by @VirtualElena
** **These are some of the foundational texts and personal obsessions I discovered while first learning about the world of crypto. I’ve put together a reading list intended mostly for people in traditional finance who are curious about the space. With that in mind, the resources below are mostly focused on stuff like transactions/payments, decentralized finance, dApps, DAOs, and MEV. In the interest of keeping this as slim and approachable as possible, I’ve excluded reading related to NFTs, crypto-gaming, the regulatory landscape. This is not meant to be a comprehensive/prescriptive list -- more so an orientation and catalyst for more exploration. As always, click all the hyperlinks and then DYOR :)
This reading list looks mostly at activity on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. There are also plenty of L1s that you should explore, as they’re beginning to see serious adoption: a list of the top chains by total value locked is available on DefiLlama.
Protocols and smart contracts have source-code available for anyone to view, so you can do a lot of digging and discovery there. There are also countless Discord servers to join, lower-profile tokens and protocols to discover (again...exercise good judgment and DYOR), and plenty of whitepapers to be read. Follow your curiosity.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper (Satoshi Nakamoto) - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Headless Brands (Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, Sam Hart, Brian Lehrer) - a fantastic essay published in 2019 from some of the folks at Other Internet that looks at the emergence of Bitcoin and other decentralized protocols as “Headless Brands” -- in other words, ideas in which every user is a stakeholder and no one individual is the pilot: https://otherinter.net/research/headless-brands/
Plus a fun related thread in the Bitcoin Forum from 2010, illustrating the communal effort to give Bitcoin a “brand” in the form of the now widely-recognized BTC logo: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41.msg238#msg238
** The VCs ask...what’s next?**
I found this sequence of posts from Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon, and Adam Ludwin all published within a few weeks of each other 2014 to be a really interesting harbinger of what kinds of applications would soon arrive, not on the Bitcoin blockchain (as they were envisioning), but on Ethereum (which officially launched in 2015).
The Bitcoin Hype Cycle (Fred Wilson) https://avc.com/2014/09/the-bitcoin-hype-cycle/
Bitcoin Price and Promise (Fred Wilson) https://avc.com/2014/10/bitcoin-price-and-promise/
Some Ideas for Native Bitcoin Apps (Chris Dixon)
https://cdixon.org/2014/10/04/some-ideas-for-native-bitcoin-apps
Bitcoin’s Killer Apps: A Look Into the Future (Adam Ludwin) https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-killer-apps-look-future
The Ethereum Whitepaper (Vitalik Buterin) https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
A Prehistory of the Ethereum Protocol (Vitalik Buterin)- https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/09/14/prehistory.html
The Meaning of Decentralization (Vitalik Buterin) - https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274
Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency (Fred Ehrsam) - https://blog.coinbase.com/ethereum-is-the-forefront-of-digital-currency-5300298f6c75
** **Blockchain Tokens and the dawn of the Decentralized Business Model (Fred Ehrsam) - https://blog.coinbase.com/app-coins-and-the-dawn-of-the-decentralized-business-model-8b8c951e734f
** **Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design (Chris Dixon) - https://medium.com/@cdixon/crypto-tokens-a-breakthrough-in-open-network-design-e600975be2ef
Progressive Decentralization: A Playbook for Building Crypto Applications (Jesse Walden) - https://a16z.com/2020/01/09/progressive-decentralization-crypto-product-management/
Crypto’s Business Model is Familiar. What Isn’t is Who Benefits (Jesse Walden) - https://a16z.com/2020/04/08/crypto-network-effects/
Scaling - (Ethereum Foundation) https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/
A good introductory orientation on scaling solutions for Ethereum
If you want to read more about Ethereum scaling solutions specifically, the blog “What’s New in Eth2” is a great resource.
** **The Dao of DAOs (Packy McCormick) - https://www.notboring.co/p/the-dao-of-daos
DAO Landscape (Cooper Turley) - https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/_EDyn4cs9tDoOxNGZLfKL7JjLo5rGkkEfRa_a-6VEWw
With these resources, be sure to check the dates. Some of the stats related to things like TVL (total value locked) and revenue may be a bit outdated. For ongoing market data, I recommend looking at sites like:
https://defipulse.com/ (NOTE: I would recommend reading the whitepapers and perhaps more importantly...directly interacting with the protocols on this list with your crypto wallet)
And also look at data available on the sites of many of the protocols themselves, which have constant updates on things like TVL, lending rates, and APYs
DeFi 101 (Uncommon Core podcast with Hasu and Su Zhu) https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Ir4dMAnKWyXVjolNQLJVK?si=d8ccdabcbefe4811
This is a particularly fun intro to DeFi podcast for so many reasons. It was recorded in June, 2020 (right when I was beginning to fall down the crypto rabbit hole and right when DeFi summer was in full swing), and the most striking thing about it is just how nascent the industry was at this point. So nascent, that a lot of this stuff is new to Hasu (...so to hear him learning in real time from Su Zhu is truly cool.). They go through a lot of introductory concepts (decentralized vs centralized exchanges) and round up a couple of the largest protocols today (Uniswap, Compound, Aave, Curve, Synthetix, and MakerDAO). It’s also worth noting that some of the stuff they say is outdated (not their fault, the industry moves fast!). Some of the stuff that happened after the podcast was recorded: at one point, Su remarks that there aren’t any large anonymous DeFi protocols...this changed in August with the launch of Sushiswap. Other things that have changed since the recording include (but aren’t limited to): there are now many synthetic asset products available thanks to protocols like UMA and Mirror Finance; Compound
** **FinTech 3.0 Re-Architecting Financial Market Infrastructure & DeFi (John Street Capital) - https://john-street-capital.medium.com/fintech-3-0-re-architecting-financial-market-infrastructure-defi-b554c634f261
To be honest, one of the best high-level overviews of TradFi/Fintech vs DeFi I’ve ever read.
** **DeFi’s Two Cultures (Graeme Boy) - https://g.mirror.xyz/KJFMrrKHwv2pAygNy3WFEcICSgHISOPn8EWeJYR_YOc
A fun, almost anthropological look at the landscape of DeFi.
** **Crypto Market Structure 3.0 (Arjun Balaji) - https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/10/crypto-market-structure-3-0/
** **So You Want To Use a Price Oracle (Samczsun) - https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/11/so-you-want-to-use-a-price-oracle/
Analyst Brain
If you still haven’t shaken the DCF-tinted glasses that frame your worldview, here are a few good posts that take DeFi protocols and give them the TradFi treatment. None of this is investment advice or endorsement.
How DAOs Should Approach Treasury Management (Shreyas Hariharan) - https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/how-daos-should-approach-treasury
Crypto Banking 101 (Sébastien Derivaux) - https://medium.com/@sebastien.derivaux/crypto-banking-101-ece9f1c2b031
MEV
MEV (Miner Extractable Value or Maximal Extractable Value, depending on the chain/PoW vs PoS) is probably one of the most fascinating crucibles within crypto right now. It’s impossible to understand how a system really works until you understand how people are trying to exploit it -- so if you want to understand how participants on the Ethereum blockchain actually behave, understanding MEV is a good place to start. Depending on who you are (and how MEV is being used), you either think that MEV is a fundamentally destabilizing force, something that attracts developers, capital, and talent to Ethereum, or somewhere in the middle if it’s monitored and mitigated effectively (hence the emergence of the organization Flashbots). Another great thing about Flashbots specifically is that they put out really helpful research on how MEV with dovetail with a number of changes in the Ethereum ecosystem -- e.g. if you want to understand the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, or changes to fee mechanisms like EIP-1559, the lens of MEV will illuminate not only MEV, but the changes to Ethereum in question.
Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges (Philip Daian, Steven Goldfeder, Tyler Kell, Yunqi Li, Xueyuan Zhao, Iddo Bentov, Lorenz Breidenbach, Ari Juels) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.05234.pdf
Ethereum is a Dark Forest (Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos)- https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
** **Escaping the Dark Forest (samczsun) - https://samczsun.com/escaping-the-dark-forest/
Quantifying MEV: Introducing MEV-Explore v0 (Alex Obadia) - https://medium.com/flashbots/quantifying-mev-introducing-mev-explore-v0-5ccbee0f6d02
** **MEV in eth2 - an early exploration (Alex Obadia and Taarush Vemulapalli) - https://hackmd.io/@flashbots/mev-in-eth2
The State and Future of MEV (Hasu, Phil Daian, Dan Robinson, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, Mahimna Kelkar) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3nACF7uVZw&t=17490s
Funnily, they spend the last ~3 minutes or so of this panel comparing controversies re: MEV to Robinhood’s tensions around payment for order flow. What is old is new again, eternal recurrence, etc.
MEV and EIP-1559 (Kristof Gazso & Alejo Salles)
https://hackmd.io/@flashbots/MEV-1559
Thread of MEV-related Tweets - Robert Miller (https://twitter.com/bertcmiller/status/1402665992422047747)
Flashbots Github - https://github.com/flashbots/pm
MEV Explore - https://explore.flashbots.net/
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