A curated list for getting up to speed on crypto and decentralized networks.
The content on the toplevel page contains what we consider essential reading.
Child pages contain deeper, topic-specific information to review afterward.
The lists here are a work in progress. We welcome any feedback or criticism!
Please open a PR/issue here or reach out to crypto-research@jumptrading.com
with any suggestions, or to report any errors.
Nothing in this repo constitutes financial or legal advice.
discusses the pattern of new technology progressing from innovation to extraction (from cooperation with their
ecosystem to eventual competition). For example consider Apple's transition from early days of encouraging
developers to build on iOS, to now charging 30% on all in-store purchases.
Discusses how crypto solves this by aligning the network with its participants.
noted researcher Hasu weighs in on the merits of protocol tokens, during a time when many cynics questioned the need for each project to have its own token
Optional: pieces discussing arguments for Bitcoin, generally as a decentralized store of value:
Vitalik Buterin's original whitepaper building on bitcoin to get smartcontracts; easier to read than the
Bitcoin whitepaper; also happens to be good explanation of Bitcoin
Next, let's try to understand the major kinds of financial dApps on the blockchain.
Although there are many types, we'd say the two most common are:
Lending protocol (a decentralized bank, i.e. a smart contract where you can loan your assets for yield, or
do borrow while paying interest). Example: Aave
Decentralized exchange (most commonly an Automated Market Maker (AMM), a smart contract with two pools of
assets that allows swapping from one asset to the other). Example: Uniswap
A third, which can be thought of as a competitor to (1) of sorts, is:
Decentralized stablecoin issuer (a protocol allowing you to deposit assets (e.g. Eth)
and borrow a decentralized stablecoin (minted by the protocol) against it). We say that it is a
competitor of sorts to (1) where the lender is the protocol. Example: MakerDAO
At this point, we'd recommend learning about alternative smart contract blockchains.
A fundamental design decision in blockchains is the mechanism by which block producers (miners
in Bitcoin and Eth 1.0) come to consensus on the next block. This problem of doing so in a
distributed system with a variety of actors--some of whom may be sending intentionally confusing
or destabilizing messages to their peers--is the key to establishing consensus and progressing the
blockchain.
Bitcoin and Eth 1.0 accomplish this by proof of work ("Nakamoto consensus"),
but most other blockchains use variants of a different family of algorithms referred to as
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) algorithms.
describing a mental model of an L2 as a chain which writes enough state back to Ethereum that
no one (including the L2's miners/validators) can send back a fraudulent state