My journey in the wilderness of blockchain

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 / thousands of dollars each day. And many thought of becoming rich over night. Even I thought of investing in it. But back then I had no money or clarity on the topic .

Soon after, this bubble faded and people lost a lot of money. Craze around it settled, that's when I started reading about it. Getting hang of blockchain is tough, it is totally different from traditional fiat finance and is all about self-sovereignty. I read about stuff like wallets, blockchain, consensus and tokens etc. Later I found out about the wizard of blockchain, who made the concept easy to digest - meet Andreas M. Antonopoulos. He has been involved in blockchain 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 smoothened my transition to this new world.

Still to that point, most of my experience was theoretical. I need some practical experience with it, 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 in past.

Other than that, I began developing applications on ethereum. Since june 2018, I had been following loom network, a company dedicated to provide tools for development on ethereum. It had a cryptozombies game 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 participated in blockchain hackathon and won 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 an app store for blockchain built on their platform. This was their first settle hackathon and I ended up finishing in third position. They published a article announcing the results and I received my first payment in cryptocurrency.

By december I had monero, steem 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 an 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 my holdings remained almost constant. I tried using open source trade bots, like freqtrade but it was too unreliable. And currently, I am longing my ethereum holdings.

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

Hyperledger is one of the pioneers, which aims at providing enterprises with the benefits of blockchain and trustless consensus. I knew about it but never got the chance to tinker with it. And in April, I happened 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 diving deeper into this world. I am going to write a post on hyperledger intern in the future and will keep you updated regarding my journey.