There are many ways to learn DeFi. You can check out the Crypto Canon—a well-curated list of crypto readings; you can take a stab at writing your first smart contract, or you can take DeFi for a spin like a regular customer.

In this quest, you'll get familiar with DeFi by using it first-hand. It's a sequence of representative tasks and questions you can complete on your own. By the end of it, you will have sampled more DeFi than the majority of people out there.

Please DM @cgst if you have questions and/or improvements.

🦊 Chapter I

• [ ] Set up a MetaMask wallet. Make sure to keep your "seed phrase" secure, for example, in your regular password manager.
• [ ] You'll need some ETH to get going. Buy 0.1 ETH or more from Coinbase or any other fiat-to-crypto on-ramp.
• [ ] Send ETH to your wallet, and say goodbye to "TradFi". 🦕 Notice the transaction costs to send ETH are non-trivial. This is because blockchain space is very expensive; even a simple transfer has a non-trivial storage/cost footprint.
• [ ] Most fiat-to-crypto on-ramps will give you a "tx hash" which proves your account was debited.
• [ ] Look up your tx hash on Etherscan. Can you figure out how much it cost to mine your transaction?
• [ ] Look up your "receive address" (aka your wallet address) on Etherscan. Can you see your debit here? Great, everyone else can see it too btw!
• [ ] Think tx fees are high? Check out how volatile they are too; the occasional spikes are crazy high: https://ethereumprice.org/gas/.
• [ ] Curious what are the gas fees right now? Go to https://ethgasstation.info/.
• [ ] If tx fees are so high, how will Ethereum ever get adopted broadly? The short answer is "layer 2" protocols are coming to the rescue. Here's how "mainnet" gas fees compare with various "layer 2" solutions available right now: https://l2fees.info/.

🦄 Chapter II

• [ ] Using Uniswap, sell 10% of your ETH for USDC. You will probably pay $25 in gas for this swap. Sorry! Gas is expensive.
• [ ] USDC sidequest
  • [ ] What is USDC, and who mints it?
  • [ ] Other than "selling into" USDC, how else can you procure USDC?
  • [ ] Imagine you hold a million USDC. Suppose you want to exchange it for legacy USD and send it to your legacy bank account 🤷. How would you go about doing that?
• [ ] So you sold some ETH. This means someone took the other side of the trade and bought ETH from you. Who are these people who are, ahem, "providing liquidity" on Uniswap?
• [ ] Why do people "provide liquidity" on Uniswap?
• [ ] Can you figure out how much ETH in theory one can sell right now in exchange for USDC on Uniswpa?
• [ ] Get a price quote for selling 0.1 ETH and a price quote for selling 1, 10, 100 ETH. Why isn't the exchange rate constant? 🤔