Week3 Blog

This was the week of DeFi, and considering that The Summer of DeFi was what got me into Web3 in the first place, it's safe to say that I was rather excited for this one. I started off the week by watching a bunch of videos on existing DeFi protocols like AAVE and Uniswap, and tried taking a look at their smart contracts as well, even though it's going to be a while before I can actually start understanding smart contracts just by glancing over them.

After feeding my imposter syndrome with a few more of these DeFi protocol's repositories, I decided to start off with the week's assignments from the fellowship.

Task1: Build a Borrowing and Lending Dapp This week's task was to let users deposit ETH to vaults made for every user and give them a stable coin in exchange. Sounds simple enough, right? But for some reason, some people (me) thought it was a great idea to replicate DAI. After discovering exactly how much went into building a stable coin, I came to the conclusion that this was in fact, a terrible idea. Although, I did have fun researching how these coins collateralize several assets like ETH, WBTC and so on to keep the value of the coin at par with the USD.

Initially, I was kind of baffled at the scope of the project and remember proposing a Luna/UST like token to the Devfolio guys, this obviously made me the center of ridicule to things like:

I'm looking at you, Jayesh. Anyway, after spending 3 days researching how I could pull off my homely stable coin scam, I was finally able to arrive at the plain fact that even LUNA/UST wasn't made in 4 days. This epiphany lead to me making a simpler version using a self deployed stable coin that just minted and burnt coins as per the current value of DAI to ETH at the given time (Stop judging me guys, I tried to be yangitkwon, but 4 days just ain't gonna cut it).

Check out the result of my part scammy nature and part incompetence down here: STABLEKWON FTW STABLEKWON FTW

Task2: Research Set Protocol This was the relatively lighter task, through which I learnt about asset management on-chain using smart contracts. Set Protocol lets you create a portfolio of certain tokens on the ETH chain even wrapped tokens such as WBTC. These are minted as tokens themselves - much like how people purchase shares of index funds, but here it's tokens. Since these are ERC20 tokens, they can be listed on exchanges and traded like normal tokens as well. I found the idea really cool.

Regular weekly tasks aside, we met up with our cohort mentor Rod and discussed potential ideas that any of us could take up. Some of them good, some of them ridiculous, but fun all the way through. And of course, I can't miss out on mentioning the part where Rod kept plugging his NFT business card in exchange for us submitting a formal proposal for the capstone project.

All in all, the week was productive, aside from the fact that I didn't quite have much time to work on the project, but I'm hoping that changes this week.