A few months ago I decided to voyage blindly into the scattered, meme-tastic dredges of cryptocurrency development in hopes that I would better understand crypto as a whole and see what all the fuss is about. It has paid off in droves. At the end of November I launched an NFT minting site on a brand new network for Ethereum called Optimism. This NFT collection happened to be the first one officially approved for that chain. I have seen firsthand how lightweight cryptocurrency online stores can be, with little overhead both from a logistics standpoint and time spent on development. Even though over one thousand customers have purchased NFT’s from my site, I have none of their personal information – no email addresses, no passwords, no mailing addresses, no credit cards, nothing. The “Login” feature took all of two weeks to understand and develop. I tested the entire checkout process from start to finish on a public test network for free before changing a handful of values in the code and having it point to the smart contract on the main network. I have found that people in this space are actually more trusting and easier to trust because we all want to make this ecosystem work. This experience has opened up my world and made development exciting again. It offers so much power for the little guy – the entrepreneur, the artist, the developer, the investor. I hope that by reading this article series you will understand why some are making such a big deal out of Web3 and why it deserves every bit of the buzzword designation it received.

Edit: Since I initially drafted this article, the episode on South Park where they make fun of NFT’s came out and it is so thoroughly hilarious but it also made me feel braggy about posting my own personal monetary gains so I’ve removed it from this article… just know that the store front (the smart contract that handles NFT sales) has collected over $180,000 since November 30th, 2021

Let’s backtrack a bit. Every so often I look at what I know and what I could be learning in my off time. What was really bugging me in September, was that back in the late 2000’s I did not force myself to become an expert in e-commerce development and with accepting crypto payments becoming more commonplace, I did not want to be left behind again. My thought process was “I’m going to get ahead of understanding integrating blockchain tech, just in case it becomes the norm, and while it’s still new, to more easily keep up with it gradually over time.” I had started taking a video tutorial on a popular website and I was not exactly confident the route I was taking (by first buying and watching a video tutorial series) was the most up-to date and efficient way to learn.

I randomly searched people on linkedin who were an engineer and had worked on anything relating to blockchain technology. One of them eventually got back to me and after some conversation, suggested I join a Meetup group for developers called EthBuilders.NYC (https://www.meetup.com/ethbuilders/). From there, I went to as many virtual meetings as possible until I got a little more comfortable with understanding what it is that people are building, and lately, NFT’s have taken center stage. This article would be tremendously long if I attempted to explain NFT’s. Just know that it was the last type of crypto website project I thought I would ever get involved with.

Then, one day I realized that one reason why I felt like I was not learning enough was because I had not tried to exhaust any one topic, and that having a goal to work towards (or more specifically, a web project to work on) would help me stay focused on a limited group of topics, based in an area I already had some experience. So I left a couple messages in a couple Slack channels and within a week or so I had found my next project – Optimistic Bunnies (https://www.optimisticbunnies.com). The NFT collection is still in the minting phase, so if you actually want to pick one of these cartoon bunnies for yourself, you still can.

Edit: now we are using a newer website for the home of the bunnies - https://optiland.xyz

The first way that Web3 tech proves itself is how easy it is to build and provide powerful features and with little risk, even as a newbie. My original thought process, about needing to learn this stuff now so I can more easily keep up with it and reduce a learning curve later has been proven wrong, in my eyes. I think even if I had waited a year, or five years, it would not have taken long to learn the basics. And by then, the wealth of tutorials and information for developers will be hard to sift through, instead of what it is now, where nearly every other article or YouTube video points to advice for investors rather than developers. However, it only took me two months (1-2 hours per day) to learn what I needed to know and build a web3 enabled UI from scratch, with no help from any other developer. There is still so much to learn to call myself an expert in the space but I'm so excited for the journey, knowing it will be a fun and profitable one.

The second way Web3 tech proves itself (the community) will have to wait for Part 2.