Web3: What I Know So Far
How what I know tells me I know nothing
Do not take this as a primer to web3. It’s not. Do not think I am an expert in web3 technology. I’m not. While starting this post, I don’t even know if I should say web3, Web3, or Web 3.0. What I do know is the trends I’ve followed on cryptocurrency over the past few years. I’ve dabbled in using Coinbase, Nexo, MetaMask, Axie Infinity, Tezos staking, BlockFi, SundaeSwap, and a few others. I even have a Ledger hardware wallet. This is just a small piece of the large ocean of Blockchain technology, and most of these fall under the decentralized finance (DeFi ) space. There are so many other technologies I haven’t used or explored.
I know this probably feels pretty deep from a technology perspective, but I promise I’ll try to stay high level. Stick with me. — Joel
I’m now a month in at a new startup company that is utilizing web3 technology. We are building something more along the lines of web2.5 right now though. We are referencing data on the blockchain and using wallet addresses as the key identifier of a user, but we aren’t really interacting with any chains directly. We aren’t even deploying our own node as of the writing of this article. We are using a platform called Moralis (and also considering Alchemy or other APIs if they provide better access to the information we need).
What I’ve enjoyed the most thus far are the data problems. We are primarily working with two different NFT contracts on the Ethereum chain, ERC721 and ERC1155. They both have their nuances, which present some interesting problems to solve with how to process the data and index it in our graph database, Neo4j. The ERC721 contracts can only have a single NFT for each token_id, whereas the ERC1155 contracts can have multiples. This means that multiple people can own the same NFT. While that provides flexibility to the NFT project owner, it does present some problems for us in trying to gather insights about the different NFT projects and their token holders. These have been exciting to me, even when frustrating.
I’m really looking forward to figuring out more NFT contract types as well as working with other blockchains. Polygon (which is a Layer 2 Ethereum side-chain), Solana, Cardano, and Tezos are all other chains that will likely end up somewhere on our roadmap (and probably others too). They will all present their own unique data problems, which will be fascinating to solve. They will also present issues with data scale, as they are more efficient than the Ethereum chain in how many transactions they can process in a given block.
Everything I’ve learned in the last month is just the surface level. I know enough at this point to be above average, but that’s still just a small fraction of the ocean that is web3. I basically know enough to realize that I know nothing, which is exciting. The amount of potential to learn more is really compelling. I’ll definitely have more thoughts about all of this to share going forward, so I hope you are along for the ride! Some may end up more technical, but I’ll do my best to keep it balanced. I’m still going to be posting about other topics; however, this is Tribal Knowledge after all, so I have to share my knowledge with the rest of you.
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