Crypto Reading List

For a more friendly reading experience, we recommend navigating here.

A curated list for getting up to speed on crypto and decentralized networks.

The content on the toplevel page contains what we consider essential reading. Child pages contain deeper, topic-specific information to review afterward.

The lists here are a work in progress. We welcome any feedback or criticism! Please open a PR/issue with any suggestions or corrections.

Nothing in this repo constitutes financial or legal advice.

Contents

• Why is crypto important?
• Blockchain mechanics & innovations
• DeFi primitives
• NFTs & digital identity
• DAOs & Governance
• Byzantine Fault Tolerance & Proof-of-Stake algos
• L1s
• L2s
• Trading mechanics
• Smart contract programming
• Economic design
• Tools & Analytics
• Exercises
• Other references
  • Other lists/directories
  • Original research
  • Online courses

Why is crypto important?

We've identified four central themes behind crypto's value proposition:

1. A decentralized ledger-based currency system.
   • anyone can participate in administering the currency, and cryptography makes it impossible for bad actors to forge transactions taking your holdings.
2. A decentralized state machine and network of computation.
   • it is extremely difficult for bad actors for enact state changes not defined in sourcecode.
3. An open network of APIs for decentralized apps.
4. An incentive model for these open networks to grow via crypto tokens.

Broadly speaking, decentralization means distributed and unpermissioned. In the ideal case, anyone can participate in the network, and the participants are both physically and socioeconomically spread apart.

Decentralization is often paired with cryptoeconomics to design an incentive model that perpetuates a healthy network. For example, network participants may be rewarded with a "native token" when they exhibit good behavior. This does require a certain level of scale, and the network is usually provably robust against bad actors under a certain threshold (see the section on Byzantine Fault Tolerance). As the network grows in size, it becomes increasingly difficult for a bad actor (or coalition of bad actors) to attack the network, because there are enough honest participants that are economically (and perhaps even philosophically) incentivized to perpetuate the network. Roughly speaking, the bad actor must have more to gain than lose from performing the bad action (ie. paying the network penalty eg. slashing + opportunity cost of rewards for honesty * probability attack is even successful). In other words, the expected value of the bad action must be positive.

Here's the list of relevant reading:

• The currency proposition:

  • Bitcoin for the open-minded skeptic (2020)
  • 7 things to read about bitcoin (2020)

• The state machine proposition:

  • https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/

• The open API proposition:

  • Why decentralization matters (2018)
    • discusses the pattern of new technology progressing from innovation to extraction (from cooperation with their ecosystem to eventual competition).
      • For example consider Apple's transition from early days of encouraging developers to build on iOS, to now charging 30% on all in-store purchases.
      • Discusses how crypto solves this by aligning the network with its participants.

• The token proposition:

  • Crypto tokens: a breakthrough in open design (2017)
    • tokens as an enabler for alignment between networks and their participants
  • The true power of DeFi composability (Apr 2021)
  • Why I have changed my mind on tokens (Dec 2020)
    • noted researcher Hasu weighs in on the merits of protocol tokens, during a time when many cynics questioned the need for each project to have its own token

More: see in-depth page: Why

Blockchain mechanics & innovations

We think it's essential reading to understand how bitcoin works, and how smart contracts (pioneered by Ethereum) work.

• Bitcoin:
  • How the Bitcoin protocol actually works (2013)
    • describing Bitcoin's mechanics, building it up from first principles
  • OR for fundamentalists, see the Bitcoin whitepaper (2009)
• Ethereum:
  • Ethereum whitepaper
    • Vitalik Buterin's original whitepaper building on bitcoin to get smartcontracts; easier to read than the Bitcoin whitepaper; also happens to be good explanation of Bitcoin
  • OR for another clear description, see How Ethereum and Smart Contracts work

DeFi primitives

In-depth page: DeFi

Next, let's try to understand the major kinds of financial dApps on the blockchain. Although there are many types, we'd say the two most common are:

1. Lending protocol (a decentralized bank, i.e. a smart contract where you can loan your assets for yield, or do borrow while paying interest). Example: Aave
2. Decentralized exchange (most commonly an Automated Market Maker (AMM), a smart contract with two pools of assets that allows swapping from one asset to the other). Example: Uniswap

A third, which can be thought of as a competitor to (1) of sorts, is:

3. Decentralized stablecoin issuer (a protocol allowing you to deposit assets (e.g. Eth) and borrow a decentralized stablecoin (minted by the protocol) against it). We say that it is a competitor of sorts to (1) where the lender is the protocol. Example: MakerDAO

Initial reading material on these categories:

• Lending protocols
  • Lending and borrowing in DeFi (Nov 2020)
• AMMs
  • AMMs (Jul 2020)
    • explaining the mechanics of the constant-product AMM popularized by Uniswap V2
  • StableSwap AMMs (2019)
    • explaining another AMM formulation for stable pairs of assets, pioneered by Curve.fi
  • Uniswap V3 whitepaper
    • explaining the 'concentrated liquidity' innovation in UniswapV3
    • see also Uniswap v3: The Universal AMM for illustrations of UniV3 emulating specific other functions
• Decentralized stablecoin issuance
  • Wikipedia article on Dai provides a good, terse description of MakerDAO and Dai, the stablecoin it issues
• Other essential reading:
  • Bridges

For much more, see our in-depth page on DeFi

NFTs & digital identity

In-depth page: NFT

• NFTs and a Thousand True Fans (Feb 2021) - an argument for NFTs as enabling a better creator economy

DAOs & Governance

In-depth page: DAO

• Beginner's guide to DAOs (Mar 2021)
  • examples of what DAOs can do (e.g. shared ownership of a valuable asset, governance)
• The DAO of DAOs (Mar 2021)
• Running List of DAOs

Byzantine Fault Tolerance & Proof-of-Stake algos

At this point, we'd recommend learning about alternative smart contract blockchains.

A fundamental design decision in blockchains is the mechanism by which block producers (miners in Bitcoin and Eth 1.0) come to consensus on the next block. This problem of doing so in a distributed system with a variety of actors--some of whom may be sending intentionally confusing or destabilizing messages to their peers--is the key to establishing consensus and progressing the blockchain.

Bitcoin and Eth 1.0 accomplish this by proof of work ("Nakamoto consensus"), but most other blockchains use variants of a different family of algorithms referred to as Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) algorithms.

• Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals: Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Nakamoto Consensus vs BFT
• Tendermint: Byzantine Fault Tolerance
  • Overview of BFT algorithms and how proof of stake chains can work, in the form of a masters thesis from the co-founder of Cosmos.

L1s

In-depth page: L1

At this point you might want to dig into different L1 blockchains--both their protocol designs and their ecosystems. See in-depth pages below:

• Historical/academic background
• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Avalanche
• Flow
• Aptos
• BSC
• Cosmos
• NEAR
• Polkadot
• Polygon
• Solana
• Terra
• Sui

L2s

In-depth page: L2

• L2 for Beginners (Mar 2021)
  • describing a mental model of an L2 as a chain which writes enough state back to Ethereum that no one (including the L2's miners/validators) can send back a fraudulent state
• Almost everything you need to know about optimistic rollups (Jan 2021)
  • builds up the design for optimistic rollups from first principles, addressing various perceived issues as they arise
• Optimistic rollups: Arbitrum vs Optimism (Jul 2021)
• Optimistic rollups vs ZK-rollups (Aug 2021)
  • a recent assessment of the state of various rollup projects

Trading mechanics

In-depth page: TradingDynamics

In-depth page: MEV/Arbitrage

Smart contract programming

In-depth page: Development

• Programming for EVM
  • Smart contract security
• Programming for Solana

Economic design

In-depth page: EconDesign

Tools & Analytics

In-depth page: Tools

Exercises

Check your understanding with these thought questions and exercises.

Other references

Other lists/directories

In-depth page: Other Lists

Original research

In-depth page: Researchers

Online courses

• Berkeley DeFi
• Foundations of Blockchain (Columbia)