DeFi Edu

Inspiration

As NFTs are exploding onto the scene in 2021, those unfamiliar with the technology behind them are left wondering why. We have been hearing about how Jack Dorsey sold an NFT of his first-ever tweet for over $2.9M or about Dapper Lab’s NBA Top Shot selling NFTs of NBA season moments for incredible amounts. According to DappRadar, which tracks sales across multiple blockchains, NFT sales volume surged to $2.5bn in the first half of 2021 and to $10.67bn in Q3. To understand the reasoning behind this novel concept, it requires a lot of research and technical understanding of blockchain to fully grasp what exactly is going on - and it can get overwhelming to decide where to even begin, with resources scattered and minimal interactive lessons available to learn about these different topics.

So we want to bring financial literacy about these relatively new fintech concepts to a broader audience and contribute to a more inclusive economy. To achieve this, we hacked together an interactive experience to help individuals learn about DeFi and NFTs.

What it does

It helps individuals start learning about decentralized finance, blockchain, NFTs, and more through curated questions and interactive exercises designed to get them hands-on experience with varying concepts.

How we built it

We built a web application on Ethereum using Solidity and Javascript. For our interactive exercise (shown in our demo), we walk users through easily creating a freshly minted NFT by deploying a smart contract on Ethereum and storing it on IPFS and Filecoin using nft.storage. We used nft.storage to upload an image file and the NFT’s metadata to IPFS, utilizing its content addressing and producing a content identifier. Then we show the CID and IPFS URI to users, allowing them to easily access their first NFT!

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was our inexperience and lack of domain knowledge in DeFi, blockchain, and NFTs. Getting a grasp on the concepts and topics was tough in itself, but then trying to build on top of blockchain protocols was a whole other beast to tackle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, just the amount of knowledge and information we have learned from researching blockchain, NFTs, Filecoin, Ethereum, and then being able to apply that knowledge to build a web app on Ethereum in such a short amount of time is a great accomplishment that we’re proud of.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the intricacies of building on blockchain protocols as we have never done so before. More importantly, we were able to take this time to learn a lot about DeFi, how blockchain works, and where and how NFTs fit into the grand scheme of the evolving economy. What we have learned during the hackathon is by no means comprehensive, but it is a starting point to a better understanding. We hope that our educational project can demystify DeFi for beginners!