How I got started with blockchain and cryptoworld

I was introduced to blockchain through bitcoin and its giant leap to $20,000 in december 2017. Those were the times when cryptoworld was going crazy and money influx in cryptocurrency was at an all time high. Bitcoin was rising hundreds to thousands of dollars each day. And many thought of becoming rich over night. Even I thought of investing in it. But being student means short on money and I didn't knew a thing about it back then.

Soon after, this bubble exploded and people lost a lot of money. Craze around it settled, that's when I started reading about it. Entering cryptoworld is tough, I had been so much familiar with fiat currency and financial institutions that initially none of it made sense. I read about basic stuff like wallets, blockchain, crypto coins and tokens etc. Later I found out about the wizard of blockchain, who makes the concept easy to digest - meet Andreas M. Antonopoulos and his youtube channel. He has been in cryptoworld from 2013 and is one of the first persons to whom, vitalik buterin(founder of ethereum) sent his whitepaper on ethereum. He has written Mastering bitcoin and Mastering ethereum, which smoothed my transition to this new world.

Still to that point, most of my experience was theoretical. I need some practical experience with blockchain, and in August 2018 that finally happened. I decided to mine some cryptocurrency and chose monero. I mined on a cluster of 24 servers for 2 months and made only $100 dollars as I was mining on CPU. Setup cost was zero, as being a student I got servers for free :) I had written a blog on it, you can go read it.

While mining was going on, I began learning about developing applications on ethereum. Since june 2018, I had been following loom network, a company dedicated to provide tools to developer for making games on ethereum. It also launched cryptozombies for teaching smart contract DSL - solidity in an interactive fashion. I learnt about truffle, ganache remix and infura.io. These helped in starting a ethereum blockchain and developing smart contracts on them. I when through many articles on developing blockchain applications on medium and tumblr. This was the time, when I found about steemit and began posting articles.

I tried my knowledge by participating in blockchain hackathon and winning one or two in the process. There was a hackathon for settle project of concourse community. Concourse monitors different crytocurrency, does background checks on their technologies and team, and publishes its findings. It has a separate project named settle, which is a app store of different applications related to cryptocurrency built on their platform. This was their first settle hackathon and I participated securing third point. They published a article announcing the results and I received my first payment in cryptocurrency.

By december I had monero, steemt and ethereum. I thought of converting them all to ethereum and that's when the idea of a crypto exchange crossed my mind. I had never used a exchange before, neither the fiat nor the crypto one. I started with binance as it is the most popular and has great UI. I began trading them with cryptocurrency to increase my holdings. I tried WAVES, STRAT and XRP currency for daily trading, but the my holding almost remained constant because of profit and loss incurred. I tried using open source trade bots, like freqtrade but it was too unreliable. And currently, I am longing my ethereum holding.

I recently participated in a Hackference Hackathon, there one of the sponsors was a blockchain platform named Xinfin. They introduced me to exciting areas of development under this technology like relay-bridge for cross-chain communication, identity management, supply-chain transparency etc. Since, then I have been more interested in the core technology behind blockchain.

Hyperledger is one of the pioneers, which aims at providing enterprises with the benefits of blockchain and trustless consensus. I had learning it in my bucket list from a long time. And in april, I got time to search about it and find out about its summer internship program. I was lucky enough that there was still time left for application submission. I submitted my proposal and was selected to work on X.509 Certificate Transparency using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain. Currently enjoying my intern and learning more about this world. I am going to write a post on hyperledger intern in the future and will keep you updated regarding my journey here.