A weekend in web3
Asta Li
|Apr 6, 2022
This is a set of resources for folks who want to spend a day or two hacking in web3 — assuming no prior experience.
We recently held a web3 hack day for the Privy team and friends. It’s hard to make time to hack on side projects sometimes and we wanted to make time for ourselves. Folks found this “Getting Started” guide super helpful and I wanted to share.
A note on mindset:
There is nothing too complicated to be explained simply and clearly.
There is nothing you can’t learn.
You have every right to become an expert here — no gatekeeping!
Getting Started
There’s no shortage of stuff to hack on in web3. But in case you’re looking for some ideas, here are a few projects and tutorials to get you started!
1) Interactive game tutorials at https://ethereum.org/en/developers/learning-tools/
My favorite is CryptoZombies — learn Solidity building your own Zombie game.
2) Follow a tutorial to mint an NFT
This bison is too frickin adorable to not mint.
Might take a little longer to mint for reals but looks like you can deploy to testnet pretty quickly.
More Ideas
*** = highlighted as particularly interesting. Wagmi.
Basic protocol work
Start mining some Filecoin
***Pick an EIP and implement it, for instance: CRISP, EIP 1559
Implement RAFT
Try to build an adversarial miner in an Ethereum testnet.
Build your own Bitcoin validation script walking back to genesis!
Set up your own chain using Tendermint and Cosmos
Dapp work
***Write a basic smart contract (check out smart contract sandbox tools)
Create a basic splitter contract
Create a basic recurring payments contract
Capture The Ether — hack Ethereum smart contracts to learn about security.
Build decentralized twitter (figure out what “decentralized” means)
***Gas golfing
Gaming
Add a feature to a blockchain game (fork and extend?)
NFT work
Create a meta-marketplace that bridges prices from Opensea, Looksnice, Sorare, Foundation, etc. Reservoir for inspiration
Timelapse of Moxie’s NFT art project https://autonomous.graphics/
Defi/cryptoeconomics
Start doing some MEV searching!
***Become a sushiswap LP (liquidity provider).Read up on what this even means. Farm some $SUSHI by following a tutorial like this or this
Set up a uniswap v3 trading pair
Build a tradebot on uniswap v3 NFTs
***YieldFarm bot 🌽🧑🌾🚜🤖
Analytics and visualizations
***Set up a visualization of a smart contract’s activity — e.g. EtherOrcs
***Ask a simple question and answer it programmatically — e.g. How much are all ERC20 tokens worth? How many ERC 721s are there?
Layer 2s and developer dapps
***Build a v0 of a social recovery protocol using a simple smart contract
Implement your own multisig — extend gnosis SAFE
Don’t just limit yourself to the ETH ecosystem, work on Polygon, BTC, Solana or AVAX for instance.
More to Explore
Stanford CS251 assignments
Etherorcs smart contract
Rabbithole.gg — a collection of tutorials around web3
There is so much more to build and explore in Web3 — and there will be many more Privy hack days too! Join us for our next one and meanwhile, happy trails!
