Reading library

A real-time scenario watch: pick three on-chain dashboards and watch them for a week.

Notes

Set yourself up with three live dashboards in browser tabs you check daily for the next seven days:

- **DeFi Llama** (defillama.com) — total value locked in DeFi protocols across chains. - **Dune Analytics** (dune.com) — community-built on-chain dashboards. Look up "Ethereum L2 activity" or "stablecoin volume" for relevant ones. - **Glassnode** (glassnode.com) — Bitcoin and Ethereum on-chain metrics. Free tier has plenty for our purposes.

Watch them daily. Notice patterns. By the time Week 3 starts you'll have an intuition for what "normal" looks like, which means you'll recognize abnormal when it happens. This is how analysts develop pattern recognition. There is no shortcut, but there's no special talent required either. Show up daily, look at the same dashboards, the muscle builds.

Related in the library

← Back to the module that introduced thisModule 14 — Part 2 recap — the ecosystem, decoded

Crypto Glossary

Bitcoin
The first cryptocurrency, launched in January 2009 by an anonymous developer or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Designed as peer-to-peer electronic cash that doesn't require a financial intermediary.
Cryptocurrency
A form of digital money that uses cryptography to secure transactions and is recorded on a blockchain rather than in the books of a central institution.
Blockchain
A shared, append-only ledger maintained by a distributed network of computers rather than by a single authority.
Cryptography
The mathematical techniques used to secure information. In crypto, primarily public-key cryptography (which lets users prove ownership without revealing secrets) and hashing (which fingerprints data).
Decentralization
The property of a system in which no single party can unilaterally change the rules or block participation.
Double-spend problem
The challenge of preventing someone from spending the same unit of digital money twice. Solved by Bitcoin without needing a central authority.
Block
A bundle of transactions added to the blockchain at one time. New blocks are produced on a regular cadence (about every 10 minutes for Bitcoin, about every 12 seconds for Ethereum).
Hash
A cryptographic fingerprint of a piece of data. If the data changes at all, the hash changes completely. Used to chain blocks together and detect tampering.
Proof-of-work
The mechanism by which Bitcoin participants compete to add the next block. Requires real computational effort, which makes attacks expensive.
Node
A participant in the blockchain network. Full nodes hold a complete copy of the chain's history and help validate new blocks.
Byzantine Generals problem
A 1982 computer-science problem describing the difficulty of getting independent parties to agree on a shared state when some of them may be dishonest. Bitcoin's blockchain solves a real-world version of this problem.
Block explorer
A website that lets you read the blockchain. Etherscan, mempool.space, and similar tools show every transaction, address, and block in human-readable form.