You made it!

First off, congratulations for making it this far! Hopefully it’s been an interesting and engaging 14 days, going from setting up your first wallet to learning about NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs, to funding public goods on Gitcoin.

I began this series in April 2022. Over the last few months, the price of Ethereum (and other crypto assets) has fallen precipitously. I had to update my intro paragraph multiple times over the course of the past few months.

However, if you’ve made it this far, I hope it’s become clear to you that this series is not about trying to get rich or make money. It’s about learning to use a nascent technology and, in doing so, grasping this technology’s potential to reshape the internet.

Although we’ve done some token transfers and swaps, we’ve neglected to cover one of the earliest and most obvious use cases for crypto: sending money.

The hype about crypto payments

Nearly a decade ago, crypto was heralded as a way to move money freely and anonymously. Here is an excerpt from a 2012 article in Wired:

Once users download the bitcoin app to their machine, spending the currency is as easy as sending an email. The range of merchants that accept it is small but growing; look for the telltale symbol at the cash register. And entrepreneurial bitcoiners are working to make it much easier to use the currency, building everything from point-of-service machines to PayPal alternatives.

The article continued by enumerating all the dubious things one could do with crypto payments:

Mark Suppes, an inventor building a fusion reactor in a Brooklyn loft from eBay-sourced parts, got an old ATM and began retrofitting it to dispense cash for bitcoins. On the so-called secret Internet (the invisible grid of sites reachable by computers using Tor anonymizing software), the black-and-gray-market site Silk Road anointed the bitcoin the coin of the realm; you could use bitcoins to buy everything from Purple Haze pot to Fentanyl lollipops to a kit for converting a rifle into a machine gun. A young bitcoiner, The Real Plato, brought On the Road into the new millennium by video-blogging a cross-country car trip during which he spent only bitcoins.

These early use cases damaged the sector’s reputation. Unfortunately, many still associate crypto with buying drugs on the dark web.

Since then, the hype around anonymous payments has certainly died down. I would hazard a guess that money transfers represent a relatively small proportion of all activity on the Ethereum network -- and the transfers that do happen are far more likely to be in a stable coin like DAI or USDC in exchange for legitimate work, rather than ETH or Bitcoin in exchange for illicit goods.

Why aren’t crypto payments more common?

Money must be a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. ETH meets the first two conditions, but has not yet proved to be a reliable store of value. Look no further than the price action over the last three months.

Stable coins, ie, coins whose value is pegged to the dollar, address the “store of value” problem. But one of the challenges with using stable coins for payments is gas fees, at least with Ethereum-based stable coins on Layer 1. You don’t want to spend $5 in gas to send $5.

Several alternative Layer 1s are working on this issue. One chain, called Luna, recently crashed. Another, called Binance Smart Chain, is cheap and easy to use, but highly centralized.

Celo is a smaller Layer 1, but more decentralized and explicitly focused on increasing financial access around the world. The Valora App, which is built on Celo, lets users make cash transfers quickly and cheaply, through an interface that looks and feels like a web2 app like Venmo. (You can buy Celo on Coinbase and transfer it to your Valora wallet through a similar process as described here.)

Sending payments with MetaMask

Today, we’ll just make a simple transfer using MetaMask’s built-in send function. We’ll be sending a nominal amount of money only. You can send it to a friend; you can set-up another MetaMask wallet and send it to yourself; you can even send it to me :)

Steps

1. Open the MetaMask extension. (It doesn’t matter what page you have up in your browser.)
2. Switch the network from Ethereum to Polygon (Matic Mainnet).
3. Click the Send button.
4. Copy-paste the wallet address you want to send money to. (If you want to send to someone’s .eth address, then unfortunately, at present, you still need to look up the public key first. You can do that easily by going to Etherscan, searching for the .eth address, and then copying the Resolved Address like you see here.)
5. Choose the Amount you want to send. You can pick something small like 1 MATIC or even 0.1 MATIC.
6. Click Next, review the gas fee (it should be negligible), and confirm the transaction. Hopefully it will execute in a few seconds!

Recap

You’ve covered a lot of ground in 14 days!

At this point, it may be helpful to review your transaction history using a site like Zapper. If you set the currency to ETH (not USD), you can see how much of your ETH has been preserved (and how much has been spent on other things, such as your .eth domain name and those pesky gas fees).

If you want to know how much has gone to gas fees, then go to Etherscan and check out the TxnFees widget on the Analytics page associated with your wallet address. You can see mine here. I spent a total of 0.03 ETH on gas fees.

If you want to check how your Klima tokens are doing, go to the Klima app. In my case, I purchased 1.6 KLIMA back in April and, by staking them, my balance has grown to a little over 2.3 KLIMA today.

You can also check out your staked Ethereum on Lido, although the 4% APR will be harder do discern. (My balance has grown from 0.0329 to 0.0331 stETH in about one month.)

Next steps

While this concludes our immersion program, hopefully it marks the beginning of your journey in web3.

This is a new frontier: I recommend exploring it with other people. Share this course with friends and family who are crypto curious. Read articles; listen to podcasts; explore crypto Twitter; join a Discord server or two. Ask questions. Everyone was new to this -- and most people were in your shoes a few months or at most a few years ago.

Most importantly, learn by doing and experimenting with different dapps, chains, and protocols.

As you explore further, I think you’ll appreciate that web3 encompasses a lot of communities, belief systems, and hopes for the future.

If you want any specific advice, such as particular communities to get involved in (e.g., “Regenerative Finance”, “Impact DAOs”, “Coffee NFTs”), then send me a direct message on Twitter and I’ll try to help.

So long, and good luck!