Web3, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency for Everyday users | Paula Guilfoyle | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Web3, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency for Everyday users

teacher avatar Paula Guilfoyle, CPA, Online Educators, Lifelong Learner

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Introduction

      2:09

    • 2.

      Class project

      2:39

    • 3.

      What is web3

      4:04

    • 4.

      What is blockchain?

      4:57

    • 5.

      What are Keys and addresses and how are they used?

      5:11

    • 6.

      What is the role of a miner?

      3:13

    • 7.

      How do transactions work on Solana?

      1:43

    • 8.

      What are blockchain explorers?

      1:30

    • 9.

      6b how to use a block explorer

      9:38

    • 10.

      Selecting a wallet

      3:18

    • 11.

      How to set up a hot wallet

      6:59

    • 12.

      How to buy and sell cryptocurrency on a central exchange

      12:03

    • 13.

      How to send and receive cryptocurrency

      9:23

    • 14.

      What is a Smart Contract?

      3:47

    • 15.

      12 blockchain ecosystems

      1:10

    • 16.

      How to explore a blockchain ecosystem

      5:43

    • 17.

      What is Decentralized Finance (DeFi)?

      4:51

    • 18.

      What are Stablecoins?

      1:36

    • 19.

      How to swap tokens on a swap or DEX

      4:30

    • 20.

      How to stake and secure a network

      8:57

    • 21.

      How to add to a liquidity pool

      7:57

    • 22.

      What are NFTs and the Metaverse?

      5:57

    • 23.

      Conclusion

      1:19

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

208

Students

2

Projects

About This Class

Web3, Blockchain, NFTs, the Metaverse. Would you like to be able to explore them and use them safely, but don’t know where to start?

Welcome to this class Web3, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency for Everyday users, a class designed to help you understand and navigate your way around web3.

What you will learn:

By the end of this class, you should be able to explain:

  • Web3
  • Blockchain
  • Private and public keys
  • Wallet types
  • Smart Contracts
  • Decentralized Finance
  • NTF's

What Skills you will acquire:

By the end of this class, you will be able to 

  • Use a blockchain explorer
  • Set up a hot wallet
  • buy and sell cryptocurrency
  • Transfer and swap tokens
  • Stake to secure a network
  • Add funds to a liquidity pool
  • Buy, sell and mint NFTs

Why you should take this class

Web3, Blockchain, NFTs, DeFi, and the Metaverse have all made headlines in the last few years. With companies like Facebook rebranding to Meta & investing billions in the metaverse, and brands such as Gucci and Nike crushing it with NFTs, it's hard to escape from these terms. But I'm here to help you embrace them instead of escaping them so you can hop on this trend and not get left behind.

The aim of this course is to give you the skills needed to navigate and participate in web3 and use blockchain applications. This course is a practical hands-on course, with lots of demonstrations, and giveaways.

By the end of this course, you will have a better understanding of web3 & blockchain as we will explain the main concepts in an easy-to-understand way. You will learn how to select and set up a wallet and store digital items safely. You will learn how to use block explorers, how to buy and sell and transfer cryptocurrency, you will gain a better understanding of NFTs and DeFi and you will be equipped with the skills and confidence needed to interact with apps based on blockchain and web3

Who is this class for?

This class is for anyone that wants to understand blockchain, web3, and cryptocurrency a little more.  It is for new people that want to learn to navigate and use web3 and for more experience as a refresher.

This course is not a coding or development course and this course is not a course on cryptocurrency trading.

Materials and resources

You will need an internet connection to take this course.  All materials and links will be provided in the resources.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Paula Guilfoyle

CPA, Online Educators, Lifelong Learner

Teacher

Paula is a qualified CPA with over 15 years' experience in the fields of Accountancy, Business Management, Process improvement, Internal Audit, Group accountant, Operations Management and Training. All across a broad range of industries and sectors. Paula has been Key Speaker at many Accounting Events where her talks on Excel are received very positively. Taken from her experiences in Accounting and business fields, Paula also has courses for those wishing to upskill, especially in the area of Spreadsheets, Bookkeeping and Accounting.

Paula is also the owner and author at https://theexcelclub.com/.  The Excel Club is the only Excel blog in the world where you can earn while you learn.  To read more about our Excel Learn and Earn Activities take a read of this

<... See full profile

Related Skills

Development Web Development
Level: Beginner

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Class Introduction: Web tree, blockchain, NFT is the multiverse. Would you like to know what they are and how they are linked? Would you like to be able to explore them and use them safely, but you just don't know where to start. Welcome to this course, navigating and using web tree blockchain for everyday users. Web tree blockchain and f t is d Phi. The multiverse have all made headlines from the last few years. Companies like Facebook rebranding to matte out and investing billions in the multiverse. I'm brands such as Gucci and Mike crushing it with LFTs. It's hard to escape from these terms. But I'm here. 2. Class project: The aim of this class is to become comfortable and competent in navigating and using web tree. To do this, you must complete a number of activities or mini-projects within this class. Throughout this class, I will carry out several practical demonstrations. Each one of these demonstrations you also need to carry out. These include, but are not fully limited to using a blockchain explorer, setting up a salon, a hot wallet, funding, a wallet, staking, using a DeFi, product, buying an NFT or even minting your own NFT. We encourage you to take part in the activities. We have some NF2 giveaways. Every month will be given away in NFT and it's easy for you to enter this NFT is a d phi and f t there already earning a return for you. And it should be a nice incentive for you to practice what you learn in this short course to be able to chance of winning and give away. There's a form attached for each activity you're going to record your wallet address. I'm the transaction number. This form does not collect any personal information, so you remain anonymous and private. When you set up a wallet, select your wallet from the transaction type and then enter your wallet address, setting up this wall and that's gonna give you an entry to the draw for the next 12 months. If you fund the wallet, select the type you performed wallet as the transaction type on the form and then enter the transaction number to prove the transaction. And you're going to learn how to find these transaction numbers later on. Same goes for staking using d Phi, buying an NFT or minting your own. You're going to have six opportunities to win these entities, except for setting up the hot wall or all activities, will only be included in the drawer in the month you submit them to me, and you can only submit the same transaction wants. The reason for these giveaways is that transacting on web tree can be confusing. There's often a number of transactions to sign and although might look easy when I do it from any of you, the first few times you make a transaction and interact with a web tree product, it's going to feel a little scary. When mistakes are made, you can lose your digital assets and this tends to freak people out rightly. So by encouraging you to practice along with me, you're going to become more confident and comfortable using web tree and blockchain. Will send out a monthly email with the details of the winning wallet and any other important news or updates. So do keep an eye on the e-mail so you don't miss it. I would and I hope to see you submitting one of your projects soon. 3. What is web3: When tree is a hot topic right now, brands want to know how to get involved. Governments are trying to figure out how best to regulate it. And end-users like you and I, I tried to figure out how to navigate it and just use it to or benefits. To understand what web tree is, we must first look at the history of the web. Before the internet, we have stand-alone computers and to move things from one computer to another would involve making a backup on a floppy disk. Then you'd need to take that floppy disk with the data on over to another computer. Install that on the computer. And these floppy desks didn't have much storage space. It took time to do things and you'd often need a few for just wound program. This was in the seventies when we had the first personal computer. And it was also in the seventies that the TCP protocol was invented. In the eighties, CD ROM came into play, removing the need for slow floppy disks that were short on storage, and TCP was adopted, giving rise to the first Internet. In the nineties, the World Wide Web was adopted. Websites tended to be static, providing wound way information to the consumer, and websites tended not to be interactive. Later in the nineties, we've seen the rise of chat rooms and live two-way communications. This gave rise to Web two in the early noughties, a web where people engaged, communicated, and became social. Social apps such as Facebook and YouTube are quickly adopted. And tech companies in the space became global leaders that centralized and controlled everything. The internet has brought many great things. It's removed location barriers and allowed for global reach and stuff like our current financial systems could not work without the progress that the Internet broad. But the excessive centralization has led to many problems. E.g. tree company's control 80% of the online logins. That's tree companies that know who's doing what, where, and when. 60% of the web storage is controlled by two companies. This has lead to constant abuse of power with data tracking, ads, privacy and censorship. We have constant data hacking and leaks in many times there's Facebook beam find that these data breaches. They happen so often that as a population, we now ignore it on the news. Then there's also the ethical use of data and the massive influence over content and our minds. Web story is about solving these problems. You can think of web worn as an intranet where you could just read. Web two with an internet where you could read and write. Web tree will be in internet where you will read, write, and on. Web tree is a decentralized internet network, secure computing, an autonomous intelligence software, cryptographically secure transactions and link this Web together. Web tree will change the way we think about trust. The internet will be exchanges directly with peers, removing the excess of centralization and trust will be put in the cold, not on the people. Blockchain technology is one of the main technologies behind web tree. In this course, all the practical stuff we're going to cover such as using DeFi and LFTs. This is all web tree. To understand web tree, you need to understand about blockchain and how that works. Once we cover that, we can then look at using web tree applications. I'm gonna be honest here. Web tree is in its infancy. Many products are still in beta. Some products are just terrible and there's still a lot of work to be done at this stage are still an early adopter. And with that, you must accept things in its raw form. But you know what they say. The early bird catches the worm. 4. What is blockchain?: Chain is a database or a ledger that is shared or distributed across a peer to peer network of nodes. Nodes are just computers which run blockchain software. The big innovation with blockchain is that a guarantees the accuracy and the security of data. And by using code blockchains January trust without the need for trusted third parties. The main difference between a more traditional database on a blockchain is how the data is structured. A blockchain collects information together in groups which we call blocks. These blocks hold sets of information, blocks of certain storage capacity and when their field they are closed and linked the previous block. This forms a chain of data known as the blockchain. Any new information that comes in after a blockers closed is compiled into a newly formed block that will then also be added to the chain. A database tends to structure its data into tables where as a blockchain, It's structures as data into chunks or blocks that are tied together. It's this data structure that makes irreversible timeline of data when implemented in the decentralized nature. When a block is field, it's set in stone and becomes part of this timeline. Each block in the chain has given an exact timestamp when it was added to the chain. The goal of blockchain is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed but not edited. In this way, a blockchain is the foundation for immutable ledgers. This means records of transactions cannot be altered, deleted, or destroyed. Imagine a super large company and it requires 20,000 computers to maintain its database. This database holds all of its client account information that the company owns. A warehouse building the height as all these computers under the one roof. And it's got full control of all of these computers and all of the info that is within these computers. This, however, provides a single point of failure. What happens if the electricity at that location goes out? What if the internet connection was lost? One of a burns to the ground. What if a bad actor erases everything with a single keystroke? In any case the data is lost or corrupted. What a blockchain does is to allow the data held in that database to be spread across several network nodes at various locations. This not only creates redundancy, but also maintains the fidelity or the accuracy of the data stored in them. If someone tried to alter a record at one instance of the database, the other nodes would not be altered and so would prevent bad actors from doing so. If one user tampers with Bitcoins records of transactions, all other nodes would cross reference to each other and they easily pinpoint the node with the incorrect information. This is stem helps to establish an exact untransparent order of events. This way, no single node within the network could alter information held within. And because of this, the information and history such as of transactions of cryptocurrency. I re reverse. Such a record could be a list of transactions with cryptocurrency, but it could also be possible for a blockchain to hold a variety of other information, like legal contracts, state identification, or company's inventory. Because of the decentralized nature of Bitcoin's blockchain, all transactions can be transparently viewed either by having a personal node, which is just a computer connected to the network which is running the software. Or you can view a transaction using blockchain explores. These allow anyone to see transactions actually occurring live. Now, each node has a copy of the chain that gets updated as fresh blocks are chained, are confirmed and added. So that means if you want to, you could track Bitcoin wherever it goes. E.g. exchanges have been hacked in the past where those keeping Bitcoin on the exchange lost everything. While the hacker might be entirely anomalous, the Bitcoins that are extracted or easily traceable. If the big coins that were stolen, then some of these hacks were to be moved or spent somewhere. It would be known. Of course, the records stored in the blockchain, in the Bitcoin blockchain and are encrypted. This means that only the owner of a record can decrypt it to reveal their identity. This is done using a public private key pair. As a result, users of a block chain can remain anonymous while preserving transparency. 5. What are Keys and addresses and how are they used?: In the previous lesson, we mentioned that the records stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, as well as most others are encrypted. This means that only the owner of a record can decrypt it to reveal their identity. As a result, users of blockchains can remain anonymous while the actual data on the blockchain remains transparent. In this lesson, you are going to learn about public and private keys, what they are and how they are used. You're also going to learn about secret phrases while at addresses and how all of these work together. Blockchains use cryptography to encrypt data and keep it secret from others. Both a public key and a private key is needed to access this encrypted data. A private key is private. You must keep it a secret at all times. Consider it like a pin number two your bank card, but way longer and impossible to remember. Never ever share your private key. Write it down, keep multiple copies and store them in different places where they would your private keys, you may not be able to access your wallet or your forms. Because private keys are so complex and almost impossible to note. The idea of a secret phrase was invented. Some wallets come with a backup mechanism called the secret phrase. Some sometimes referred to as a dynamic plays a backup seed or a recovery phrase. This is to help avoid users losing access to their wallets if they lose the private key. Secret phrase is a collection of 12 to 24 words that store all the information needed to recover and access all the forms of a crypto wallet. It can be used to derive the private key is that the wallet as the secret phrase, is a weapon representation of the random numbers the private key is. Older person gets access to your secret phrase. They could steal all of your crypto phones stored in that wallet. So jewels like a private key, keep it safe. Write it down and store it safely in multiple places if need be. This brings us onto public keys. Public keys used to encrypt messages. Once the sender encrypts the message using your public key, you can unlock it only using your private key. Digital signatures are used to share public keys and transactions are signed using a weld. Transactions are digitally signed with the user's private key and verified by the user's public key. That makes it easy to identify the transaction sender in the network and confirm that a trusted identity sent the transaction. When we move on to more practical stuff, you will see this in action. Digital assets and crypto phones are stored in or rather assigned to a wall of address. While other dresses, like a bank account number or an I-band, the wallet address can be shared with other people and it's used to receive transfers of digital assets. The wallet address is mathematically derived from the wallet public key true or one wave function called hashing. The wallets address is a shorter representation of the public keys. Final part usually have length of about 160 bits. The wallet address is a unique identifier of a crypto. Wallet. Address format depends on the respective blockchain, but it usually consists of about 25 to 40 characters, that can be numbers, letters, and sometimes even special symbols. Now a wallet address is safe to share. It allows others to spend money and check all prior transactions from and to that wallet address. While other dresses don't allow external users to see who owns the wallet, as well as addresses are typically not tied to a specific identity. This changes with central exchanges like that or down to kind of regulation. Now that you understand the main elements, private keys, public keys, secret phrases, and while other dresses, Let's take a quick look at how all of these work. Together. You create a private key. When creating a crypto wallet, you never do anything with it consciously, but it's used to send your transactions. When you send crypto assets, you create a secret phrase and sorts safely on a piece of paper. You use it if you ever have to restore your crypto while a phones after losing the private key. The public key is used to verify that you're the owner of a wallet address and that you can receive crypto assets. You personally don't use your public key when making or receiving transactions. And you tell your wallet address to the sender. If you were to receive a transaction or use it if you were to send yourself money from a different wallet out the same cryptocurrency. Likewise, you need the wallet address of a recipient if you were to send a crypto asset to them. 6. What is the role of a miner?: My name is secure and network, they do so by verifying transactions and approving block's. Miner is just someone that runs a computer on the network with the software which we already know is called a node. To secure the network, miners must agree on the state of the data and the blocks within the blockchain. And they do this using a consensus mechanism. A consensus mechanism is how a blockchain gets it snowed participants to agree on the state of the data and the blocks within the blockchain. The blockchain world getting everyone to agree, especially when the people you're voting with our anonymous can be difficult. A consensus mechanism is a procedure to make sure everyone agrees on a blockchain. What we want people to agree on is the state of the blockchain, including transactions, smart contracts, and data. Today's the most tried and tested consensus mechanisms are proof of work and proof of stake. Let's talk about proof of work first. Proof of work is used by Bitcoin and many other blockchains. Proof of work takes computational power. Computers work toward solving complex mathematical problems. And the first to solve the problem, what wins the block mining rewards? This means the more computational power you have, the more chance of winning the reward. The main problem with this is that all the computers are trying to solve the same problem and only one wins. Meaning the power used by the losing computers was just a waste. This has become a hot topic as it's not seen as sustainable due to its energy demand. Proof of work is a very secure consensus mechanism. Should a bad actor trying to use transactions, they would need to control 51% of the network for the transactions to be included in the block. The cost required and do so makes this just not possible with current technology. However, time will tell with quantum computing at the time of recording it theorem just migrated from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. So let's talk about proof of stake now for a second. Proof-of-stake requires minors or validators to stake or locking coins or tokens to take part in the consensus mechanism. Networks then select one or a few notes that have staked to actually mined the block. This means is no waste of energy or computational power. Many proof of blockchains will also have slashing penalties. Locked-in coins can be removed if the node runner is not acting in good faith, the more one has locked up, more trustworthy. They're saying because these are the ones that have more to lose. There are many other consensus mechanisms now being tried and tested and these are paving the way for blockchains to do more than just hold transactions and execute smart contracts. And I'm sure that there are many more to come which have not yet been deployed yet. 7. How do transactions work on Solana?: In the resources, you're gonna find a link where you can explore the concepts from this video is a little bit further. And I'd really advise you to take a look at the resources that are provided. Not all blockchains are created equal and each one is trying to be the fastest, the easiest to scale, and the most decentralized. But there's a trade-off between these tree and this is known as the scalability trilemma. Solana is taking a unique approach in trying to solve this. Solana is known for its speed and how many transactions that can process. To do this, Solana combines several key features. For consensus cylinder uses a combination of proof-of-stake and proof of history. Proof-of-stake is used to select validators. The more a validator stakes, the more skin they haven't. Again, the more they could lose. Its inherent that they're trusted more if they act badly, their stake slashed. Once a validator is selected, it has 5 s to work through what's known as the verifiable delay function or the PDF. This PDF is basically how proof of history works and attracts time. Issuing a time stamp, ignoring a local computers time proof of history. Let's use this. Create a historical record that works as proof that an event took place at a certain moment of time. This removes the bottleneck of proof of work and proof of stake nodes are not waiting on other nodes to confirm a time. As a result, blocks can be produced faster. We're going to use Elana as our web tree platform in this course for our demonstrations and for our examples. 8. What are blockchain explorers?: Blocks are produced and chain together on the blockchain. Unless you actually run a node, it would be impossible to see the transactions and to verify anything. One of the key features of a blockchain is that you don't have to trust, you can verify. So block explorers were invented. A block explorer is a user interface that reaches into the blockchain and grabs the data and then displays it in a useful way. It allows you to search for wallets, transactions, programs, and smart contracts. Very often, if a network is busy, your transaction might be patenting it in your wallet and a great way to keep track of it and see when the transaction occurs is width, a block explorer. Each blockchain has its own explore. Some have multiple explorers, but overall, they tend to do the same and provide the same sort of information. In this demonstration, I'm going to use salt scan and this is one of the block explorers for the salon, a blockchain. There are others and I'll leave links in the resources. And as we move through this course, if you carry out the practical demonstrations along with me, you'd be able to follow your transactions on top cell scan or other explorers. This is really worth doing. Many people freak out when they start signing transactions for the first time. But once you can read and follow your transactions, then you're going to be an awful lot more confident. So lets hop over to solve scan, and take a quick look. 9. 6b how to use a block explorer: In this video, we're going to look at Seoul scanning dot io, one of the block explorers for the surround of blockchain. This is only worn out of the block explorers that is available. There are other alternatives, one being explored, dots alarm.com. But as I said, the one we're gonna go through today is solved scan dot io. What a block explorer will allow you to do is look up blocks and transactions happening in real time. I'm not going to allow you to search for transactions at layer two, search for accounts. It'll allow you to search for programs and contracts. On solved scan, they give you some information about the network on the homepage or pair we have the salts apply the circulating and non circulating supply. We have the slot ranges. We've got network information such as the block high transactions per second. And we also have details about how much of the token is stick to have current stake and we have to link with steak. If we scroll down, we have in NF2 dashboard showing the popular NFT, their floor price and the volume. We also have a DeFi, decentralized finance dashboard. At the moment, it's showing by volume, but you can look it up by total value locked. If we scroll down a little bit, we have more details on DeFi HMMs or automatic me, market-makers. And if we scroll down a little bit further, unsold scan, we also have details of the transactions per seconds. So this the last 30 min, or we could change it to hours for the last 6 h and the average Pink time. Also then on so-called scan is a Twitter feed showing updates about Solana. So as I mentioned with a blockchain that you can look at data happening in real time. To do this up here, if we on the top, if we select blocks, we can go in and we can see the most recent blocks or these all these blocks happened a minute ago. We have the block hash, the slot, the time the transaction count. So this tree and a half thousand transactions in that particular block leader. So this is the validator, and the validator rewards any of these items here in blue, a clickable, which means you can drill down and find out further information. If we drill into the block hash, we're going to get details of all of the transactions that were included in that particular block. So we've got 3.5 thousand transactions. And if we scroll down, we can see all the different transactions that has happened. That the signature, this is the transaction ID. If you're looking to look up the transaction, you need the signature, which is the transaction ID. So we can click into the signature. Now we can see this is an update price. So this will be an Oracle feed that is updating the price somewhere on the blockchain. So we can see here it is an auricle. We can see the publisher. The publisher is the rider, the signer, and the fee pair. And we can also see that it has interacted with a price account and it's written to that point account. You can see other details as well about the instructions when they are available as you scroll down. If we just go back there now to blockchain, and this time we're gonna go to transactions. And when you go to the transactions, you can see all the individual transactions that have currently been approved. Now we can see most of them there are just voting transactions that have been included. So I'm going to just refresh and see if anything else comes up of interests that we can look at. So we go into this evolving transaction, we can see that the main action was to vote on a slot. We can scroll down and see the instruction details as well. That's how you can look at live transactions as they're happening on the blockchain. But what you're going to use a block explorer for more, most often is searching for accounts and transactions. If you have a transaction pending in your world, it's easy to come here to the blockchain explorer and look up the transaction and see it actually happening live. The first thing we're going to look at isn't a Kent. I'm going to paste in an account number. When I pasted in, it recognizes that this is an address. So when I go into it, we get some information about the account. We can see how much salt is in the account, and we can see how many tokens or in the account. So these are non-Native to the blockchain are built on top of the blockchain. Would in here, then we can see all of the transactions that this account made, e.g. we can see the soul transferases. There's the soul transfers, the token transfers. We can see the token accounts. We can see the stake accounts. And we can see any domains as well. Returning to the home screen, if we put in a transaction number and you'll find some transactions that you can explore in the course resources. We can see that this transaction, so here's the signature. So this is your transaction ID. We can see the result, we can see the signer, and then we can see the main actions. So to interacted with a program. And what happened? Well, one soul was swapped for m. So if we scroll down, then we can see the actual instructions. So here is all the writable actions that happened on the blockchain. And if we keep scrolling down, we can see all of the transactions, as I said, that happened within this. Now, if we go up further in here, we can look at the salt balance change. So this is the native token on how the native token of the blockchain changed within this transaction. The token balance change is how the non-negative tokens changed. So we see we have a balanced before, a balanced after Anna change. So in this circumstance, the, this address, this owner sent 0.93 of these marinade stay tokens to this particular account here, which is the receivers. So they're down that amount and these are up that I made. Let's have a look at another transaction. In this transaction, again, we have the signature, we have the signer, and then we have the sole transfer. So what's happened here is we've transferred so from this account was transferred from this account to this account and it was 1.882. So there was also a small fee involved. And if we can scroll down, we can see all of the different interactions that happened for that particular transaction. The soul balance changed for what we would expect to see is a minus all of the 0.882 coming from this account and a positive. So going to this account, Let's double-check that. So we can see a minus all coming from this account. This was the signer and the fee pair. We can see it going into this account because the change is going upwards. Now because it's the only token that moved in this particular transaction is sold. What would you expect to see in the token balanced change? That's why you're not going to see anything because there was no movement of non native tokens in this transaction. Let's get back to the homepage again. This last example, we're going to look at a program or a contract, but put in the contract and dress. And what we can see here is the current supply. And we can also see the number of holders that would show how popular this particular token is. We have the token address, we have who authorized the token. And then down here, we have lots of information about the tokens. So we have all of the transfers, we have the transactions, we also have the holders. And the holders is a good gauge of how centralized something may be. Quite often, you'll find many of the healthy, large percentage holders, maybe exchanges or liquidity pills. But that's something you should really look at because if it's an individual and they've got 97% of a token to dump, their gonna jump on the community when they can. There is an analysis as well available. So again, you can see the token distribution is not very well spread out. You can see all holders is increasing, but the active holders has been decreasing. So you get some useful information in the analysis. You can have a look at the markets which there's no data or metadata if there is any available. So as I said, most often you're going to be using a block explorer to local transactions and maybe look up your account. But it can also be looked at for further information on analysis on the blockchain, such as about FFTs or DeFi, um, to see transactions happening live. 10. Selecting a wallet: In an earlier video, we spoke about wallet addresses, and in effect, wallets are keys to access your phones. A wallet as a piece of software that interacts with the blockchain, stores your private key, monitors your cryptocurrency balances and allows you to send and receive cryptocurrency. There are many cryptocurrencies as there are also many wallets. It's important when you're selecting a wallet, you ensure you select one that's compatible with a cryptocurrency that you want to use. If you try and send cryptocurrencies to a wallet which are not compatible with that token or coin, the transaction could fail, or the tokens could get lost forever. Wallets can be described as hot and cold wallets. Hot wallets create and store private keys online. And examples of these would include desktop or mobile apps. Exchanges are also considered hot wallets as they're online and they're considered one of the least secure ways to store in cryptocurrency. Exchanges are a target for hackers because they hold a lot of cryptocurrency and different types of hacking in exchange is often seen more profitable than trying to hack a cold wallet. There's also the problem on exchanges that the crypto UC in your wallet is all from the same crypto, someone else's. And exchange it is centralized finance. And if there were to be a Ronan in exchange, they might not have the liquidity for everybody to withdraw. When we're talking about wallets and exchanges, the term custodial and non-custodial will often come up in exchange does not give you a private key and a well-known saying in crypto is not your keys, not your wallet. You need to have cost today the private keys to truly own the token that, that wallet Crohn's access to an exchange is a custodial wallet as they have custody of the keys. A wallet in which you have control of the keys is a non-custodial wallet. As no one else, consent forms are transact from this wall as they don't have the keys. Saying all of that. Most of you will use an exchange to buy cryptocurrencies as they are one of the most popular on ramps. A cold wallet creates and stores private keys offline. They're also known as hardware wallets, and they're the safest way to store your crypto and digital assets. When using a hardware wallet, there are more steps involved, so it's often not so practical to keep everything on a hardware wallet. So you need to make sure you select both a hot wallet for convenience and a cold wallet for security and safety. More recently, self-managed hot wallets can connect to a hardware wallet allowing for greater security on the cold wallet. And this is definitely something you should consider spending the time setting up. The setup is going to depend on both the hot and the cold wallets that you are using. Choosing a wallet is a combination of personal preference and its intended use. In the next video, I'm gonna show you how to set up a hot wallet so we can use it in the demonstrations. Moving forward. 11. How to set up a hot wallet: In this video, you're going to learn how to set up a soul flare hot wallet. And you're going to learn how to fund out wallet directly using moon pay. I've navigated directly to solve her.com and you're going to find a link to this in the resources of the course. Make sure you use the right link. Otherwise, you could be subject to a phishing scam. And it's easy as just changing one letter in the URL and having everything identical. And it's quite common scan. Once we've navigated to salt scan, we have an option to download. But first, why did I choose salts can, well, it supports hardware wallets. It from directly within the wallet you can stake and Aaron, you can connect your apps. You can buy, store sand and swap crypto, and you can manage your LFTs. They also have a live chat and some support if you need it, and a learning academy. We're going to download this wallet now, when we select downloaded, identify as the platform that you're using. So it's identified that we're using Edge Chrome. So I'm going to select Download. And when I do this is going to download to my browser bar. So we can now select Add to Chrome. And this is just a double-check to allow it to add it to Chrome and we can see it's downloading been added to Chrome. Now, I'm going to select the little icon. This brings me directly to solve flare. In here. If you have a hardware wallet, continue with your hardware wallet might advise you take the time to work out how to connect your hardware wallet because of his more secure. We're going to go straight to, I need a new Wallach. And when we do this, we get our recovery phrase. This is a twelv letter or a twelv word phrase. You should never, ever, ever share this. Write it down and keep it safe. Software gives you the option as well to download the moons you downloaded and you can use the upload feature to re-upload it instead of typing it all in. So I'm going to select Download, that'll download to your computer. Then I'm going to move onto ice, saved my recovery. Next, I'm going to, you can either copy and paste your words back in or upload. So when you select Upload, you navigate to where the file is stored and select the file. And that will upload the words for you. Then you press Continue. Now you need to set up a password. This password is so you can then access when your wallet, when you just lock your wallet, X to be asked to follow on Twitter, I'm going to say not now. And we are now in our setup will appear. We can see the forms we have in our wallet and we can see we don't have any funds available in her wallet at the moment. This here is very important. This is your address. You use this to receive funds. If you're sending yourself phones or if somebody else is sending your phones, you use this. You can copy it, selecting this copy icon, or you can get the QR code by selecting the icon beside the coffee icon. When you select the receive button, you also get the QR code. We're going to look at the second option in a later video. Up here, we can see this is our portfolio. We have a tab for activity. So when we start making transactions, they're going to show up in here. We also have a tab for staking, which we're going to look at in another video. We have a swap, which we're also going to look at in another video. And collectibles is where you can quickly receive and view. Your NFT is I've just taught back there to portfolio. In our account options, we can add new accounts, so we can have more than one account within the wallet. We can also log out, but this has gone to completely luxury waved. And you'll need your recovery phrase to get back in. In our settings. We can see which account we're in at the moment. If we have multiple accounts, we'll see which one. The network we can add things to the ER and other people's wallets to wear a dress book. And we also have security. Security allows you to hide balances. So that means when you have balances, somebody looking over your shoulder won't be able to see what you have and that's great if you're out in public anywhere. We also have the auto lock them. This a lock your wallet by 15 min. You can change the time and there are when you want the auto locked, sitting there from in here, you can also quickly lock your wallet. So if you're moving away from your device or something, you can lock your wallet. And to unlock it, we need to use the password that you use when you are setting your wall. Then here we have the assets and there's only one asset loaded into this wallet at the moment, and that's the Solana token. And the Solana is the need of token of the Salon of blockchain. We can see the current price of this, and then we can see how much we have and we can see we don't have any of this at the moment. You can fund your wallet directly from within here using moon pay. If we click to expand in here, we can see we can buy and we can send. For this. We're going to quickly take a look at by this brings us to moon pay. You do need to set yourself up with an account on moon pay before you can fully use it. Once your setup, you can buy a cryptocurrency using your general online payment method for other purchases, you specify what you want to spend and it'll tell you how much that you'll get for that price. If euro isn't your local currency, you can select from all the different local currencies here. Once you do this, if then press Continue, and then you can enter your e-mail or you can sign in with Google Plus and continue and you'll go through the purchase process. As I said, like you would do with any other online payment. That's how you can buy your cryptocurrency and fund your wallet directly using numpy. So some important stuff to remember, this is your dress. Don't forget when you are leaving your computer to lock it so people aren't looking over your shoulder out of and in the Security option, do take in mind that balances can be visible to people that are looking over your shoulder and consider hiding your balances that will help keep your tokens secure. 12. How to buy and sell cryptocurrency on a central exchange: In this video, you're going to learn how to buy cryptocurrency using cash on an exchange. You're going to learn how to sell cryptocurrencies back to fear. Also using an exchange. For this example, I'm using biomass.com and you can use whatever exchange it is that you want to use because most of them work the same. I've already logged into my account and I'm on my main screen. Now, if you have not gotten account yet with an exchange, you will need to set one up. When you set one up, you will need to go through a KYC process. Kyc, know your customer, it's done so they can avoid money-laundering and illicit activities. So once you go through the process of identifying yourself so you can prove who you are. You can then easily buy and sell crypto on the exchange and transfer forms back to your bank account. I'm finance. Once you've logged in, we have an optional peer to buy crypto. We can buy crypto would a bank deposit. We can buy crypto with a debit or credit card with the cash balance or word pair trading. Let's first look at a bank deposit. So once we go in here, we are going to deposit fear. So by depositing field, we will put feet straight into the exchange. So let's select €1 that we want to transfer your own. If you're not euro, it select from the drop-down your local currency. Then you can use either a bank card or a bank transfer. I'm going to press Continue. And when you go through continue, you need to provide additional information so you can use the service. This is your proof of address. So once you put in your address, you can continue. You can then if you haven't added in the documents, add in all the documents. Now, I'm going to cancel that because I don't want to actually do this and bring us back here. So that's getting fit into your account. Then you can also buy with a credit card or a debit card. So I'm in here now with the credit card option. And we see we have a BIOSCREEN and we have a South Korean cell will allow you to sell your cryptocurrencies back to your credit cards. So e.g. I. Have a little bit of Bitcoin and here I can select the maximum and it'll tell me that it's gonna give me 926 euro. There is a limit. But if I wanted to transfer that nine, 26-year-old, the correct amount. So over $15, I would just press continue and go through the process. And that will send the money in feet straight back to my credit card. They've come back to buy here. And let's say we wanted to buy some Solana and we're using euro. We have Euro selected at course, if you're a different currency, select the drop-down in here, then we can then select the currency that we wanted to buy. Let's say salon, e.g. let's say we wanted to buy one Salaam. So we'd enter in the amount. We want to buy one Solana. It tells us how much the salon is. We then press continue. And this will go through our card process and it will carry out the transactions, and then it will lodge the Solana directly to her. Well, the difference with this and the bank deposit of fear is if you deposit fear, you have fear in your Exchange account and then you need to buy the crypto or if you use the debit credit cards, you can buy directly with the debit credit card. In the bike crypto, we also have deposit crypto. So if we wanted to deposit a token to us, we can use this option here. Now there are other options as well for buying our crypto in here. So I'm going to select the wallet and I'm going to go to my fear spot wallet. In here. We can see all of the tokens that I'm currently holding now I have my balances hidden at the moment. But you can see all the tokens that you're holding in here. If you want to buy a cryptocurrency using another cryptocurrency on an exchange. This is known as a trade. If you use a swap or a decentralized exchange, it's known as a swap. In this case, what we want to do is buy some Solana and we're going to buy at using B USD. I see I do have some BUS D here and we have options in here to buy, sell, deposit, withdraw, trade, earn, and convert. We're going to go through them in a later video. Up here we have the Search option. I'm going to search for Solana. We see Solana, it's come up here. Now, if we press buy, it brings us back to that boy screen that we see in earlier on, where we can buy our crypto directly from our credit cards. We can also sell from within here. So that is going to let ourselves directly back to our credit card as well. You pause, it would be sending some tokens to hear withdrawal. So we're going to look at deposits and withdrawals later on. What we're going to look at now is trade. What we wanna do is buy some Solana for some b USD. This is a trade or trading, one token for another token now be USD is a stablecoin. So what's going on here? This is quite a busy looking screen and this is not a course on trading. So I'm going to go through this very, very quickly. Over here on the left-hand side of the screen we have what is known as an order book. An order book will show you all of the buy and sell orders along with the volume of them orders that people are willing to buy it and sell the token for e.g. if we look down here, the orders 1,668.92 worth of Solana. The dollar value of that is 58,000. That's changing constantly because those orders happening. But if we look down here at 33, 93, so quite a lot. There is 48,000 worth of orders in here at 33, 93, where people are willing to buy at the same here for the sales. People are willing to sell. We see here there's 43,000 worth of salary orders in a 30, 408. That's your order book and you can see how many orders are in here. We also have a chart. This chart has green and red, and the green means that the closing price was higher than the opening price. Red means that the closing price is lower than the opening price. These are known as candles. And in this particular chart, each one of these candles is a day. I know it's a day because up here, we can select the timeframe. Let's go down to a 15-minute time frame because we're actually going to buy some of this now in a second. So in the last 15 min we can see the pattern that was formed from the trading activity That's been going on with Solana. Over here we have the price and we can see that the price, the current price at the moment is 30, 401. So we can see that down here in the sell orders that the current cell order is 30, 401, that is the sell orders, but by order is in a 34. So down here, we then have where we place our orders. Over here, we have the bisection, and here on the right we have the cell section. Now it's extremely important that you use a limit spot order. That means that when you put in the order, you're putting it in at the limit, at the price that you want. Whereas if you put in a market order, it's going to give you, you can set the price that you want to buy or sell at. So we want to use a limit order. Now, we can see I have 64 billion USD available, and each one, as we can see, is 34. Now the current sell price is, thereby price is 30, 403. So I'm going to change this to 34.03 and I'm going to buy 1.89. So we see this gives us the full price here. And we can select by Sol. We can see that our order has now been created. And over here we have a yellow dot to show whereabouts in the order book, our current order sets. Let me scroll down here a little bit. And when you scroll down, we can then see this in open orders. We have the sole be USD pair. It's a limit order. We're buying. This is the price, this is the amount we're going to get when this order starts to feel will see percentage filled here. And we'll also see the token that we can see that it has geost failed and the order has moved from open orders. And if we go into order history, we can see it's in here in order history. Let me just explain a little bit more about what's going on here in this screen because it is a very, very busy screen. Up the top here we have the current price, the 24-hour change, the 24-hour high price, low price. Then we have the volume in Seoul and the corresponding volume for 24 h in BUS t. As I mentioned, we can change the time-frame of these particular charts here as well. And it's going to look different with the different timeframes that you come in on. The order book we have shown here. At the moment, we can see both sides of the order book to buy and the sell. We can just go in and look at the buy orders. And we can also just go in and look at the sell orders. Coming over to the right-hand side of the screen, we have all the different pairs that are available. So if you wanted to trade something else, you can just select the pear from within here. Here we have the live trades. These are the live traits that's going on with the selected pair. The pair being the two tokens that you're using, in this case BUS d. And so you can see the live orders as they're happening. And then you can also see your own trades if you want to. Now if I go back to my fear and my spot wallet because we know this transaction hasn't now happened. So if we go back in here, we can see I now have Solana in my wallet. I can do, I can sell, I can transfer their sum. We're gonna go through that in the next video. In the next video, that's exactly what we're gonna do. We're gonna learn how we can transfer cryptocurrency from an exchange to a wallet, or from a wallet to another wallet or back to an exchange. 13. How to send and receive cryptocurrency: In a previous video, you learned how to set up a solar flare wallet. And I hope that you went ahead and set one up and entered into the draw for the contest. In that video, we also showed you how you could buy Solana directly using moon pay. So we clicked on Solana in our wallet. We went into by and we can buy directly and fill our wallet with some Solana. And I would suggest there to do all the examples along with me that you do go ahead and buy ten or $20 worth of salon. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can send and receive crypto assets from your wallet. So as you can see, I am in my soul flare a wallet here, and this is the address that I want to receive forms two. Now we do have some assets in this address, but this is where we want to receive the forms too. So we can copy this address because this is the wallet address that we want to give people. Now I'm going to hop over now to my central exchange, my binary exchange, it can't. We also seen this in a previous video and you learned how you can buy some salon or trade for different cryptocurrencies or how you can buy on an exchange with your field. What we're gonna do now is withdraw our Salama and we're going to draw the Solana to a different wallet. Now it's different to selling it. You don't want to sell your Solana, you want to withdraw. So if you're transferring to antibody from a central exchange, it is not a cell, it is a withdrawal. When we select withdraw it gives us the coin that we have selected and we now have the option to enter the address and to select the network. It's very important that the correct network is selected. Now when we put in the address, it should auto select a network for us. But you do need to understand this. Lana on the salon and network is not the same as the Solana token on the finance marching. Solana on the binary smarter aim would be a wrapped token. Where is the native token on these ulama chain? So they are two different tokens in effect, and you can send directly to the buy-in and smart chain and hope that it's going to reach your Solana wallet on Salama. You need to select the correct network. Now I'm going to select the wrong network for a moment. So it's saying to confirm this, I'm just going to say Yeah, I'm sure for a moment. And in here we need to paste addressed. So this is the address that we copied from our soul farewell. Once I selected the address, it actually obtain the network for me because it recognized that this address type is a sunlight at rest. But don't always rely on this being correct and updating for you if it entered in the wrong one, make sure you know what network you're sending to. Down here, we have our next options. So this is the amount we want to withdraw. So I'm going to withdraw the maximum moment, which is what I have, the maximum amount I have in my wallet. If I just delete that back up there, we can see that there is a minimum amount that we need to send. The minimum amount is 0.02. But as I said, I'm going to put it in my maximum amount. That's the amount now entered. And I'm going to select withdrawal. Now when I select withdrawal, this is going to go through my two-factor authentication. So you'll have to go through the same steps to tells me first to confirm it, makes sure the address is correct, the network is correct. We can see the fees I'm gonna be charged and the amount of salt. And now I need to go through my verification process. So you go through the same process and I'll see you back here in a second. So we have verified we can save our address to our wallet and add one step withdrawal to make this simpler for the next step or the next time we send forms, then we can select completed. Now what's going to happen now is it's going to go through the network. So we can see here this is waiting for approval and it needs wound. I would warn confirmations. We can see it's gone to Solana, the address, and it's come from our spot. While. If we click on this icon here, we can see our withdrawal detail. So we can see when the order was submitted, that it is currently being processed by the system and it gives us an estimate time that this withdrawal will happen. So we see it's still waiting for 1 h the wound conformation. So it needs confirmation on binary and it also needs confirmation on the Solana network. So it says it's coming from the spot wallet and all the different details. And we also have the transaction ID down here. So I'm just going to close this now. And hop over to my soul for their wallet. And we can see that this, these forms have actually, now, here's our solar flare wallet, and that was really quick and we can see them here before ByteDance has actually updated. So we can go back in here, I'm going to scroll down there and we can see it still looks like it's processing, but it's actually hit a wall. Then we can have a look at some activity. So if we go in here to our activity, the last transaction that will come up, we see here a minute ago. And this is the transaction and the transaction that we just processed and this lambda that we transferred. Now if we click on this, it brings us into the transaction and it's the transactions that you need to get used to reading, so check your channel transaction. So first of all, we see the signature, this is the transaction ID. We'd see the block number. How long ago was the result that it was successful if it was failed, would fail. This is the validator that signed the fee. Then we see the actual actions. So we transferred from here to here, this amount of salt, the transaction version and the previous history or hash is in there. Now we can see the advanced details as well. This was a soul transfer and this was the source, this was the destination, and this was the amount. We scroll up here, we can see the salt balance change. This is the account it came out of, and this is the exchange account. So what happens is the exchange has an account on Solana, their own wallet and so on. Are they send it to that wall. And then from that Solana wallet, it goes to your own wallet. So the exchange wallet is down now by 1.882 and our wallet is up by 1.8802. And this in here is the fees that were paid. There is no other token changes. So it was only salon last transaction. So that is the details of looking at the transaction. If we go back here to our portfolio, and then here we can send tokens so we can send our Salon from here. So let's say I wanted to send one Solana. And let's say I wanted to send this Solana back to the exchange for whatever reason. I'm going to go to my fear and my spot wallet. I'm going to search for the token Solana. This case I want to deposit now I want to deposit Solana. I want to deposit a from the salon and network. So now I would need to copy this address. Copy this address, go back to my soul flare wallet, enter it into my soul flare wallet. This address has no phones. Are you sure? I'm going to say yes to this? And I'm going to press and now you need to sign the transaction which your wallet. Now I'm going to cancel this because I don't want to make the transfer, but you need to sign the wallet. So it says that you are sending wound Saul, I'm wearing you're sending it to. So get used to reading these transactions. And once you do that, it'll go through the same process to sand the tokens back to the exchange wall of acetate to send them to the exchange while other, in the first place. If you need to send anybody some tokens from the software wallet be at salon or anything else. You use the sand option. E.g. if we wanted to send some USD, see we come down to a USB-C select and entering the amount, enter in the address and select Send, Confirm the transaction. 14. What is a Smart Contract?: Bitcoin was first generation blockchain. It's a simple database that records transactions and it's based on proof of work. Second-generation blockchains added the ability for blockchain to store and run programs on many blockchains. These programs are called smart contracts. These smart contracts have led to the ability to create tokens such as stable coins, decentralized applications, or depths. Smart contracts are programs that run on a blockchain and self execute when conditions are met. This makes them autonomous. When a smart contract runs or executes, it can result in the exchange of money, the delivery of service, the unlocking of content protected by digital rights, or the changing of name on a land title. That despite being called contracts, smart contracts are not legally binding contracts. The main function is to programmatically execute business logic and if needed, legal contracts might also be needed. Smart contract uses basic logic, e.g. if the temperature of a food storage ban rises above four degrees, it should return all the stock to the supplier. Once that logic is defined on the smart contract is deployed on the blockchain, must then be configured to listen to events and check on the logic criteria. E.g. an IoT device could be placed in the storage fan. And the smart contract must read data from it. If the device sends a signal plus four degrees, then the contract will execute. The execution in this case could be a text message to the driver of the van telling them that the field has been spoiled and to return back to the distributor. Blockchain is perfect for smart contracts because Blockchain is secure and immutable and the data from a smart contract is encrypted on a shared ledger. This helps make transactions and other business processes more secure, efficient, and cost-effective. And there's also a cost saving on transaction costs. Smart contracts are perfect for many business cases such as supply chain industry. Smart contracts could automate hot health care payments towards use, overfit billing and prevent fraud. The music industry could record the ownership of music in the blockchain and then deploy smart contract to ensure royalties are paid. The music is used for commercial purposes. Smart contracts are very cost-effective because they can both reduce operational expenses and save on resources. E.g. a complex process run by a smart contract does not require the staff resources for monitoring the processes that it would require using a manual method. Smart contracts are also very fast, which increases processing speed. They're performed automatically, which means there's no need for third party to handle any transactions in-between the parties. Smart contracts can also be very reliable. And removing human error, there is a security risks must be taken into consideration with smart contracts. Although it's currently impossible to hack a Blockchain, smart contracts are only programs and they can have vulnerabilities, and so they are often the target for hacks. For this reason, it's important in the development stage that the smart contract is tested and older should. Another drawback of smart contract is that they are often written I configured in a way that makes them really difficult, if not impossible, to change. This is great for security, but if the parties have a new deal than a new smart contract must be written. 15. 12 blockchain ecosystems: Changed to be a successful web tree Platform, applications must be built on top of them and people misuse them. These applications and any partners are going to form a blockchain ecosystem. The blockchain itself being the lower layer which needs its own infrastructure. So just hot nodes to higher layers, such as decentralized finance applications and NFT or metaphors, projects, and even social apps. The more players involved in a blockchain ecosystem system that better, it shows growth and adoption and is a good indicator of the likelihood of success from that blockchain. Most blockchains, we'll have a link on their webshop site showing off their ecosystem. Many apps and protocols you're going to find are also cross chain. Which means developers have made the application available across different applications, different layer warms, like the way Microsoft have their office package available for mobile desktop, Android, and iOS. We're going to hop into a quick demo now, as I want to show you how you can explore an ecosystem and find out what apps and partners are involved. 16. How to explore a blockchain ecosystem: In this video, you're going to learn how to explore an ecosystem for a blockchain. I'm going to show you three different ways that you can explore an ecosystem. The first way is by going to the blockchains, that website. Because most often they're going to want to showcase the ecosystem. That is, they have available on their Blockchain. This is going to be all of the partners and all of the data that they have built that have been built on top of the network. I have Navigator to the cyan or website and the ecosystem page. So solana.com, ecosystem. In here you can see details of all of the different projects that have been built on top of or have partnered with salon. E.g. we can see trending projects this month. So we've got step and swim formed function. Hello, Moon, nation. We've got the trending projects this month. You've got the top DeFi products, you've got the top lending protocols. If we scroll down a little bit further, top NFT marketplaces, top web tree apps or audiences of greater app. You've got the decks projects. And then you've just got more details about Solana. You can click into any of these. And once you have a Solana Wallach, once you've set up a salon, a wallet, you can actually use any of these, connect to any of these with these. That is the first way you can start exploring ecosystem. Second way is a Google search, but using images. Very often somebody from the community or somebody from the team will have developed a nice little infographic to show all of the different projects and things that have been built on top of the salon and network. Now I'm just going to scroll down and I'm going to make this picture a little bit bigger. And this is thanks to Arians, and it was updated on the seventh to September 21 and a shout out, and thanks for this. What we can see here is the wallet. So these are all of the different wallets that were involved in some manner. So we can see solar flare in there. We can see trust Walton ledger in there. So they'd be popular with us infrastructure. So these are the likes of the nodes and bridges that work along with Saldana Are we have, is a storage solution. The graph is data. We also have tooling and explores. So we looked at solved scan, but there are other explorers available for the salon and networks. So this is tooling and explores auricles. Auricle brings verified off-chain data. Onto chain. We have stable coins and stable coins are tokens that are pegged and back to a particular currency. We have d Phi. We see there's a lot of DeFi products going on here and we will be having a look at d Phi in a different video. We can see some applications in here and we can see, we've got the likes of rope, we've got lava, we've got audience, we've got maps me, we've got kin, we've got loads of great apps in there. Then we also have gaming and LFTs. So we have different gaming and NFT projects that are available here. There's also another way. The third and final way is by going to coin Gekko. I'm just gonna go to the homepage of coin Gekko and this shows your cryptocurrencies by market cap. But if you search for Solana or any older network, you can go into further details. Now if gifts details such as token omics details, if you scroll down, it'll give you the chart. It also gives you other information for the markets that Solana is traded down, some Salon Guide, so on the news and so forth. But what we want to look for here is the salon ecosystem. And once we select the slanted ecosystem, we can see all of the other tokens that are involved with whether they be partners or apps built on. Now the good thing about this is making sure that you go to the correct websites, especially if you're going to connect a wallet. Because if you don't have the correct URL, as I mentioned in a previous video, you could be subject to a phishing scam. But if you go to the website directly from within coin Gekko, you always know you're going to the correct link and to the correct site. These are all of the things that are available in the ecosystem. And as we can see, this list is really long. So these are all built within the ecosystem itself. So that's three different ways. The first way is to go to the blockchains website and look for the ecosystem page. Second way would be to Google and image. And the third way is to go to a data aggregator sites such as coin Gekko and have a look at things from there. Take some time now to explore the salon ecosystem yourself and maybe try connect to one or two of the projects using yourself. Farewell. 17. What is Decentralized Finance (DeFi)?: We live in a world where finance is centralized via a middleman, the bank. We trust the bank to hold our money. We trust the bank to keep proper records. And we trust the banks to work in good faith. But let's face it, that's not how things happen. The global financial crisis of 2008 was caused by bad practice, over-leveraged, uneven illegal activities. Facts are, bone. Banks don't have the cash to pay out to everyone that's made a deposit. We still use the bags day in and day. I would have many of us have contributed to their bailout, while some of them have been allowed to fail. What decentralized finance aims to do is remove the middleman, the banker, and it puts you in full, full control of your own financial transactions. You can lend or save and earn a yield or return on other at the rates that you want or that you agree to. You can also borrow. And the fact that you can act like your own banker making d Phi more profitable than CFI. Because in Central finance that banker needs to be paid. Decentralized finance has the ability to make wealth more equal around the world by providing liquidity in places that it's hard to get. E.g. an entrepreneurial firm or in a developing nation really wants to buy this harvester. But as local buy-in can lender wants to charge him 20% interest. Farmer can't afford this. So he can't grow his business. Yet in the developed world, There's so much liquidity. Well-off farmer would like to earn the yield on his savings, but the banks aren't paying you money interest. Now imagine this. The farmer from the developing nation was able to ask the farmer in the developed world for a loan. And he said Yeah, because he was willing to pay them 7% interest. Well, that's 7% is way more than what he's getting from the bank. So we gladly lens that I would, while a farmer in the developing world can now buy his equipment, grow his business, exports and products, and put more money in his local community, everybody wins. This is something that is not currently possible with centralized finance. The most common uses of d Phi for the normal person is yield farming, lending and sticking. Your farming is basically providing liquidity to a shared pool. These liquidity pools that are common on decentralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges or taxes, then return the fees charged from trades and swaps to the liquidity providers, which then gives them a yield. Liquidity providing is very popular and you'll often find to add liquidity, you'll need a pair of tokens or coins, e.g. eat and Bitcoin. So you'd add equivalent amount of these two, the pill and others can then take and add from the fill and the fees used for from this pills then I shared with the liquidity providers. You can compare this to a bank. When you launch your money, it goes into a pill that the bank then uses to lend and borrow against. However, this is often a Phi of x leverage, meaning for every dollar or euro you see on your bank statement. For others are seeing the same dollar or euro in their bank. The bank lends out your money. They charge interest to the person borrowing, but you don't get that interest. The banks keep it in d Phi. You keep it. In one of the upcoming demonstrations, you'll learn how to add and remove funds from a liquidity pool. And I do hope you'll practice along so you understand the transactions and that you're comfortable making them. What I've not covered is impairment glasses that is outside the scope of this course. However, I'll drop a link in the resources for you to take a look at as there is some risk involved when adding to liquidity pills. We're also going to look at staking as an example. Staking is a type of d Phi as it returns a yield to the person that steaks. We've talked about proof-of-stake earlier in this course. Anyone can stake and help secure our network. Most often staking on your own won't be sufficient, does there's a lot of stake already backing up the network providers. So you can add to a staking pool instead or select a validator and stake directly to them. It's really important that when you're using DeFi, you do your own research and you work within your own risk tolerance. All of the risk mistakes or bad judgments there on you. I'm one of the drawbacks is that you don't have the protection that centralized finance does offer. Some ways to stay safe using date d Phi or not to chase high gains be realistic. If you can get a couple of percent return on your investments, that's much safer. A less risky option than entering into a d Phi product returning a high percentage gain. 18. What are Stablecoins?: A stablecoin is a coin or token that is backed by another asset or algorithm which helps keep the price of that token relatively stable and pegged to a fixed place. Stable coins along with smart contracts from the basis for the majority of DeFi out there. Usd see is a stable coin which is pegged to the dollar. It does this by backing up the coin. What real fear dollar. One of the big differences between query crypto and stable coins is that stable coins are often governed, controlled by a central authority. Unless of course they're algorithm based. The central control leads to a question of trust that the reserves are there to pick them back up the coin and that they actually exist and are valued correctly. In 2021 tether and its affiliate exchange briefing. Next, we're find 18.5 million after a case regarding the cover up of $850 million. In 22, Tara, an algorithmic stable coin went to almost zero and sent shock waves around the stable and crypto market. Stable coins make up a huge portion of the crypto market cap. As a tool for remittance. They make payments easy and fast around the globe, making them a popular and viable alternative to fear. However, there were also used for trading. Prior to stable coins. Uri would have first to have buy Bitcoin and then trade at the Bitcoin further, coins and tokens. Now exchanges are seeing people use fee it bi-stable first and then use these for trading, bypassing Bitcoin. In most cases. 19. How to swap tokens on a swap or DEX: In this video, I'm going to show you how you can swap tokens using your software wallet, which is very similar to any other DEX decentralized exchange or automated market-makers. In our wallet, we have a swap option. So I'm going to jump into swap. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to swap some Solana for some USD. See, let's hop into our swap them. This gives us our swap screen. Here we see USD C comes up here at the top. So this would be swapping from and to. So we want these the other way around because I want to swap some Selena for some USD. See here we can select the amount of Solana that we want to sell. So let's say I put in 0.9 Salon. This will then tell us that it is going to go through here to get from Seoul to USB-C. We see how much you SDC we have and we have more information. Let's go down to the more information. So first we're given the rate, next we're given the slippage. So this is the difference that you're willing to accept between the price that you enter on the price that you actually get. So in this case, it's a 5% slippage. We can add it from in here, or we can edit it a different way, which I'll show you that in a second. This is going to show you then the minimum you'll receive based on the slippage. The price impact. The price impact is how much it's going to impact the price of the actual tool. And then you've got this fee discount. Let's scroll up here for a moment and we will go into the settings of oxygen and this is your slippage settings. The slippage that I mentioned earlier on, you can set how much slippage it is that you want from within there. So I've changed it up to point, won't change the down 2.1%. I'm willing to accept less of a slippage and closer to my actual price. So now I have my slippage set. I am saying I want to swap 0.9, so I'm going to get 30 us DC. So we swap. I will confirm that this is the transaction that I want. We can see it's confirming and we can view this on the Explore. So here we can see the confirmation that's still going through. We can see the signer, we can see the fee. We can also then see the route that this took. I transferred 0.9. This went through and interacted with the Jupiter or aggregator program. And it went ahead and it's swapped 0.9 solve for 30.5 to USD C, and at ten or $0.12 USD, see as well. We can scroll down further and you can see them, the different interactions that happened, all the different interactions that happened. We can see the soul balanced change. So we can see the soul coming out of my account going in over here to this pool here. And then we can see the token balance change as well that happened within this transaction. Let's go back to the overview. Let's go back to solve flare and back to our portfolio. And we can see now in our portfolio we now have $30 worth of us TC. In another video, we're going to show you how to use a DeFi product where you staking in a liquidity tool. When you're staking in a liquidity pool and pool that is two-sided. You'd need an equal value of both tokens to stake equal value in US dollar terms. So what we're going to stake is our US DC and our marinade in the next video. So that's some d Phi example. So do go ahead and swap some of your tokens. If you got some marinade stake solve from that particular video, get an equal amount now OF US DC or an amount of USD. See that you can use in the next example and practice along with me. 20. How to stake and secure a network: Video, you're going to learn how you can take so you can secure a network. You remember we spoke about proof of stake as the consensus algorithm. Staking allows you to earn a return on your steak tokens. So it is something that is worth considering doing and it would be considered a type of d Phi because you do Aaron back as some sort of APY. Let's have a look at the staking options in the soul flare Wallach first and then I'm going to show you some other staking options that are available for sticking with Solana, our soul firewall, or we have staking and under staking, we have tree further options. Two of these are partnerships with decentralized finance protocols. This is the liquid dots all staking and the S L or S staking. The native store seeking is separate. Let's have a look at this first, because this allows you to basically stake against a validator that you choose. So first of all, what you need to do is put in the amount. Now the minimum amount that can be staked is going to be worn soul. After this, you then choose a validator. And we can come in here and you can see all of the validators that are available to stake against. You also have this option here to help me choose. And when you go into helped me choose, this is going to bring up the Solana Beach website. And the Solana Beach website gives you different information about the different validators. If you're staking against a validator, it's really important that you do your research. Remember, they can be slashed if they are behaving in an unfavorable way to the network, you want to make sure that they have uptime all the time, that they are acting in good faith. I'm going back to my soul, flare a wallet and once you select a validator, it will give you some validators details like the stake, the fee, how much has delegated, and the script blocks, which in this case is extremely high. And personally, I wouldn't be gone for a validator that skipping that many blocks. So again, do your own research. This one here is skipped ten blocks and we can go through and we can see how many each one has skipped. This one is skipped as well, 10%, e.g. I want to show you, we're going to stick one. We're going to stay steak and they have to sign your transaction. The transaction will always tell you what it is you're trying to do on the blockchain, getting used to reading these, you're delegating one soul to these. I'm not going to confirm this. I'm actually going to cancel this. So that's direct staking and how you can do directly stake staking from your soul Waller. Before we look at these other two partnerships, I'm going to show you some other websites. The first one is many stake.com and validator view. Then you can connect your salon or wallet to this website. You can speak directly to validate us from within here, or you can use this to do your research and then steak from yourself flare wall. So I'll put a link to their site into the course resources. In here the search options are M to look by how much has been staked. So the amount of salt delegated to a validator, the APY. So this is an estimate to commission. The data center. Data center is important because if everybody has their nodes and the data center, the data center goes down, that's going to affect the network. There's also performance on this one. Another option is skied with. Again, you can select your wallet from here and you can stake from within here. Or you can just do your research from one here and go back and pick and sulfur. This has its own rankings for ranking the validators. And we could see all the different validators down here with different information. So with the skip rate, the lower the better the voting rate, the higher the better commission. And the APY. We see up here, we have a skip rate of zero for quite a lot of these, the voting rate and the APY, this one has a skip rate of 1% at 3%. As we can see, it does vary. So make sure you do your research when selecting your validated. Next, we're going to look at this S L, or S staking. And this is a partnership with a validator would have put a stake in the pool and they're using d Phi as their option here. So what it does is it provides you both with an APR and the number of benefits within solarized itself, such as lower face. So depending on how you look, how long you lock in your stake for, the amount of stake will depend on the different things that are available. To do this, you need to create a staking account and you can do this all straight from within yourself. That is a partnership where you can stake weird. There's also the liquids, soul staking, and this is powered by marinade. I find this one extremely interesting and we're going to have a further look at this in another tutorial. Liquid staking. You receive this M cell, so you give your soul and you receive M cell back. They go on, they stake the soul. The M sold that they've given you is a liquid token and it represents the stinks or your steaks always going to grow in value, but you also have this liquid tokens. So that means you have instance staking and on staking if compounded rewards and within Liquid M, You can use it with other DeFi protocols. So this helps obviously to improve the security and the decentralization of the salon. A blockchain. Let me show you a quick example here. So as I said, the minimum staking for salon is going to be one cell. Let's say I stake this here. So I'm gonna put in worn and say steak. It's telling me I am putting in one soul and I'm going to receive back 0.93 m. So I'm going to confirm this. We can then jump into the explorer and have a look at this. It may explore, this was a swap. I've swapped tokens here. In effect, I've swapped my solve for M soul. And the soul that I swapped has been staked on earning yield force. So we see the signer, the interactions. So that's the M cell that I got, the soul that I sent. And if we scroll down, we can see all of the different details that has happened within that particular transaction itself. If we go up to the soul change, we can see that this is the amount of salt that my wallet has actually moved by. If we go down here, we see the receiving wallet is up by one. So there's this tiny, tiny fee in there as well. If we look at the token balance change, we can see the change in the marinade sticks all. So my wallet has gone up by this amount and the issuing world has gone down by that amount. So we've got a balanced before and a balance after. So that is the transaction after happening on the network. Now if we go into staking, we can see in here now that we can easily onstage the M cell that we have available. So if we press this, we can select on steak. This is going to convert our M salt back to Solana, which I'm not going to do right now. I'm going to leave it in there and you can confirm that and move forward. But now we have some m saw in our wallet. So if I go to my wallet, we can see I now have 0.9, 37m. So in my wallet, I can use this in a different DeFi protocols. Also, Aaron rewards there and we're going to look at that in another video. 21. How to add to a liquidity pool: In this video, we're going to look at adding forms to a liquidity pool. You'll remember from a previous video that we staked soul. And when we staked ourselves, we got em soul. In return. We're going to use that m sound now to stake in a liquidity pool. The M cell was issued by marinade finance and I've navigated directly to navigate to marinade finance. You'll find the link to this in the course resources once you get here, if you go to the app. So I'm going to select go-to app. Once we go to the app, will also need to connect our wallet and they're connecting your, we'll need to connect your wallet or any web tree website that you want to work with. I'm going to select Connect wallet and I'm gonna select my soul flare while this was going to ask me, do I want to connect to an extension or a web wallet? I'm going to collect connect to my extension. Now it's asking me if I want to allow notifications or trust this app. So if you trust it, it means that you login to it automatically. Next time you connect, I'm going to select Connect and I'm not going to enable these notifications. Now we can see in here that we can stake cylinder. This is staking Solana like we did directly from our soul flare Waller. But we can go into marinade finance and we can stake directly in here. So in here, you would enter the amount of solvent you have pressed takes all and you will receive the M cell. Well, we want to look at in this video is the d Phi options. And we want to participate in d phi by liquidity providing there are three options or three opportunities on that marinade we have marinade staking, and marinade staking is staking the native M cell token. There are three options here available. We can stake it on its own. So this is a single-sided pool and this is the APY or the return that you get. The TV L is the total locked value. That's how much is already locked in this pool or the smart contract. Down here. We then have two separate liquidity pools and these are two-sided. We've M cell to solve, paying 3% on M, soul to soul paying 8%. Now this one, you will mine M and D. So once you've staked chick onto mine M, N D andre liquidity providing, we can see all the two-sided pools and the return in APY and the total value locked along with the provider. Marinated an aggregator, it goes and looks for all of the best pools. And the sum of these pools are not on the marinade finance but radium. This one is on saber and so forth. The tokens that we have, our M cell and UST see, and this is what we are going to provide liquidity to. There's also the option for lending and collateral so you can lend your M cell. And for lending your M saw simplify, you get 13%. But for lending at unsold lands, you're only going to get 1.2%. So there's different returns that you can get using lending and collateral when you add your phones to the pool, when you supply to a pool, you're allowing other people to borrow from that tool at this predefined interest rate. You can also, as you can see, borrow directly from this pill. So we're gonna go back into liquidity providing, and I'm going to select add liquidity, liquidity for the pair that we have. And this brings us to the radium website. I need to also connect to this website because I want to interact with this particular website. So I'm going to select Connect and say nothing. What we'd been shown here is the area to add liquidity to the pool. And let me explain. When you're adding liquidity to a two-sided pool, you need to add equal value in dollar and payment to both sides of the pool. E.g. if I take my M cell and just take half, I've got 0.9 tree and just take half. It's coming in at 16 67. It automatically takes the same amount of my soul. In this case, 16, 67 worth of salt that's not sold that I want to add to the pool. What I want to add the pill is USD, see. Usd see, I've got $30 worth and with my m, so I've got $33 worth. So I can't stake all of my aerosol because I'm short $3. So if I select MAX on my USD, see it's selected the right amount of M cell to add to the pool. So you're adding comments to each pill. If you need to buy a token in advance so you can add them to the pool. You can use the Swap feature. And the Swap feature will allow you to exchange one token for another. So back into by liquidity. And I'm going to scroll down here for a second. And we need to make some conformations here. So you need to read the liquidity guide and confirm. Now, I'm going to say all of this with a health warning because we haven't gone through the liquidity guide. When you stake into a pool, there is risk involved and this risk is known as impairment losses. What I'm permanent losses means is that you may not get back the same amount of tokens that you originally added to the pool. These pills are automated market-makers and they work by balancing out the price of the pool. So when you add em saw a new SDC in equal amounts to the pool. Somebody can then come along and they can take out some M cell. Which means then that the value of USD see against the MSO slightly changes to reflect the quantity that's held in the pill. So I'm going to scroll down here and I am going to add this liquidity. Now, when I add liquidity, we'd see the transaction comes up here for us to approve. And we make sure that we read the transaction before we prove it. So we can see that this has now been added to the pool. Solana is extremely fast and if we scroll down, we can see our liquidity section. We can see in our liquidity section that we have a pill to mount. We have a pooled quota and we have our liquidity. It is from in here. If we wanted to remove liquidity, that we would remove the liquidity. To remove liquidity, you need to press this minus button here. Remove liquidity. Then you can select the amount that you want to remove. So let's say we're moving the maximum and select Remove liquidity. Once you remove at the original tokens, the M cell and USB-C will be returned to your wallet. That it's important to note that you've named stake here on radium. We haven't staked on marinade finance. So when you want to check your staking pool, check your liquidity, remove liquidity or increase liquidity. You need to make sure you navigate to radium dot io. It's a good idea to bookmark anywhere that you do have added forms to a pool and there are tools that you can use to keep track of all the DeFi products that you're using. 22. What are NFTs and the Metaverse?: If T stands for non-fungible token, and they became rather famous in 20.21, mostly for art and jpegs. However, their utility goes way beyond that. But at the same time, there has been a bit of an expectation gaps on what they can and what they have been used for so far. Let's start by explaining the difference between a fungible and a non-fungible token. Fungible tokens are assets, are divisible and they are not unique. For instance, via currency like the Euro are fungible. A wound NeuroNode is the same and has the same value as a €1 note in Paris. Fungible token can also be a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is worth won't be coin no matter where it's issued. Non fungible assets, on the other hand, are unique and non divisible. They should be considered as a type of deed of title or ownership of a unique, non rapid cool item, e.g. flight tickets, because they can't be another one the same due to its specific data. A house, a bolt occur. These are non-fungible physical items because they are one-of-a-kind. Non-fungible tokens can be created and stored in a public blockchain that is open and accessible to anyone. The items they represent a verifiable and traceable while the owners can remain anonymous. From a technical point of view. And FTEs are meant to true smart contracts that assign ownership and manage the transferability of the NFT. The mentoring process involves a few steps from creating a new blocked validating and recording the data on the blockchain. One of the earliest NFT is that became really popular with crypto keys. This is a game where players purchased bread and traded virtual cats. And they all have different features and varying levels of rarity. We're on a theorem launched in 2017 and by October AD and I had 1 million cats being bred and over 3 million transactions and smart contracts. Shortly after lunch to work concerns, the crypto kiddies was crowding out or the businesses using the deuterium platform, game caused an increase in pending transactions on the period, and at one point accounted for about 25% of the network traffic. The people that created crypto kiddies set up a company, dapper labs, and they went on to raise millions and funding from VCs. And f t is allow creators to claim royalties on future proceeds after the creator herself with first-time. Now the possibility claim such future grams or gains is a breakthrough in the creators world on its encouraged many creators to turn to this digital marketplace. All user has to do is activate a specific function on the blockchain. The procedure allows for profit percentage to be paid to the creator every time the NFT is sold or change of ownership. For the first time, we're blockchain technology. Creators have the opportunity to monetize their production. And they can do it without the assistance of a third party like an agent. But it's not all about creators. I've TAs can also be used to bind communities and their utility can include access to private and exclusive events, gated content, and future benefits. Lfts are also being used to create digital, sustainable fashion. I spoke with one creator in this space and her reason for moving to LFTs and digital fashion, we're extremely interesting. As a fashion buyer and designer, she spent a lot of time in factories creating the garments. And after years and years of this, the fibers called such problems to our airways that you require treatment and an operation. She believes the current fashion industry is not sustainable. I'm working conditions are extremely poor. Now. She creates designs themselves, digital wearable fashion. And FTEs have also migrated into the DeFi space. The monthly NFT giveaway here in this course is a d phi and f t, where funds have been added to the pool and an NFT has been issued to represent this holding. These LFTs can be sold or transferred, withdrawn from the pill, and they will continue to accumulate yield for the new owner. We're going to be given one of these away every month, preloaded and earning yield. So make sure you're entered into the contest. Now, let's talk about the multiverse. Like all things web tree, the multiverse is still in its infancy and to be honest, it is not brilliant. The metal versus a combination of real-world experiences and digital experiences. Matter versus not necessarily running around in 3D space like we did in Second Life many years ago or decentralized today. Instead, it could be a mix of technologies from augmented reality to virtual reality, more digitalized economy. But most of all, as it stands, the matter versus not ready. Metal versus just speculation. Somehow created game worlds and attached a few f and f t is, or maybe even coins and call this the multiverse. But companies like metta, unity, roadblocks, Microsoft name, but a few are all building technologies that will enable interaction with virtual worlds. We are nowhere near the idea of a Ready Player One Unified metaphors. Because the metal virus do not fully exist yet and still in development. It's really hard to say exactly what it is. What I do know is from the worlds that I have explored, the concerts I have attended to the art galleries, I have visited the amount of errors. The average person won't be able to use it in its current form. I have a super-fast Internet connection and a decent gaming laptop, and I still struggled to move around in a non clunky way. It's just so everything yet, everybody wants in billions is being spent to make a metaphors. And brands are already trying to figure out how they can utilize it. 23. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing this. It's been quite a journey and I'm glad you've taken it with me. If you practiced along with me in this course, you should now have the skills needed to navigate and participate in web tree and use blockchain applications. You should have a better understanding of web tree and blockchain. And you should be able to explain the main concepts in an easy to understand way. Should know how to select and set up a wallet and store digital items safely. You be able to use block explorers and buy and sell and transfer Cryptocurrencies. By now, you should have a better understanding of NFT is d phi. You should be equipped with the skills and confidence needed to interact with apps based on blockchain and web tree. I really do hope that you have enjoyed this course and that you've submitted transaction so you can be entered into the draw to win one of the LFTs. And I also hope this is not the end of your journey. Don't forget, you can connect with me via metopes, groups and social media. I'd love to see you attend one of my more detailed courses up a later stage. I am really glad that you selected this course. My name is Paula, and thank you for taking this with me.