12 years ago in an old community library, i read about the Berners lee internet, i have always been curious to know how the innovation of the internet came to be,how are we able to send and receive information digitally across devices? as a teen, i felt this was some kinda sorcery and the peak of what could be done on the world wide web!

Never did i think that someday i would become a part of this sorcery that now goes beyond sending and receiving data, to owing this data, controlling how i want my contents to be used or traded. How did i get here? i was in a barber shop on a good afternoon and overhead some friends discussing about some stuffs on the internet that makes them money when the price goes up, and they buy more when the price is low . This felt unrealistic to me and i was totally lost in my thoughts the only thing i held on to was “BTC” i presumed that was the name of the commodity, few hours later after i had my cut in the salon, i rushed home, opened my PC and searched ‘BTC’ on google, 80% chances that this was what they were talking about, believe me all through that day i was glued to my screen and the more i researched the more confused i became, this was sometime 2018.

Days turned to months, i made some commendable progress on my research at least i then knew ‘BTC’ was short for bitcoin, and it was some kinda digital assets on the internet, it had other siblings like ethereum,litecoin,usdt,Eos and more, they were generally called cryptocurrencies .

I wouldn't say i regret most of my mistakes in my early days onboarding to crypto, what do you expect from a self taught boy? i was vulnerable to rugs, i made bad trading decisions,my wallet got drained, i trusted some founders and teams and ignored proper research, i invested in scam projects that pulled liquidity, i saw cryptocurrency and blockchain as trading assets and reading charts only!

I would be bias if i mentioned just the hurts, there were good trading days, epic moments in crypto, amazing projects and launch, life changing airdrops, quality friends and connections built, hackathons and much more ...

Way back 2019 till date i witnessed epic moments in the space like ; facebook announcing ‘Libra (its own cryptocurrency), Zuckerberg was also an early believer of the metaverse, we saw the rise of Defi where projects launched through launchpads,Presales,huge airdrops like UNI,HEX which i was eligible to claim, we saw some big exchanges and projects get exploited,hacked and some rugged like Binance losing over $40M in 2019,Luna crypto network crash with a wipeout of over $50M which landed ‘Do Kwon’ the founder in jail, the collapse of Ftx exchange, we saw Nfts getting global attention from 2020 with early players like Azuki,i remember staying up late night to get a whitelist to mint ‘otherside meta by bored ape,moonbirds Nfts and the saga with their community over IP and founder exit , i witnessed Eth 2.0 merge, bitcoin halving and pizza day , i witnessed the pandemic of shitcoins like ‘shiba,pig,sanshu,dogecoin’ i made cool profits from most and still lost some to rugs,

we saw many projects build their layer 2s on ethereum like Arbitrum,Polygon,Optimism ...

Crypto ux and dapps were complex to use especially for non-technical users, back in 2022 we saw domains like ENS get adoption, i claimed over 4ENS names of which 3 where digits which i later traded for over 5eth each that’s like 8x in profit.

My onboarding to web3 was not so smooth and straight because i had little guides or big frens in the space in my early days. A lot has improved now; crypto Ux, security, more tools and infra for builders, better apps, bigger community and products, tutors , L2s and EVM compatible chains. I can’t count ten steps in without Ethereum, this is not because i am an Eth maxi but because ethereum is not just a chain it is an ecosystem and back pillar for 60% of blockchain apps and tools today either directly deployed,rollup,compactible,fork,data chain and more.

If you are new to the space or yet to understand what it means to come onchain , you’re just like me some years ago who saw the internet and blockchain as sorcery,but there is more to that !

Think of the blockchain as a wonder book 📖 (Ethereum)where people could write their secrets,recipe,record their transactions and all without fear of data theft or loss . Now let’s call the people who use this wonder book the ‘Etherns’

Everyday of their life,the record their transactions,earnings and data in pages of the book, this book cannot be stolen or manipulated. Overtime it got a bit stressful to use the wonder book because people from different parts of the city come to use the book, the elders of Etherns thought it wise to create smaller versions of the wonder book and keep it in the different communities of the city, this is to improve accessibility,scalability & reduced congestion/traffic. (Ethereum L2s) ; this is the layer 2 of the wonder book and it is built on the same stack and structure of the book, now this mini wonder books are found in different communities in the city, so instead of queuing to be able to acess the wonder book you could use the mini wonder book in your community,and any data you record in the book is verifiable and secured just like using the main wonder book, but here you get to acess the book faster without having to travel miles to use the main wonder book in the city capital .

Ethereum is an ecosystem with lots of apps,users,projects,builder tools available so if you’re getting started onchain this is the perfect home for all,here are some guides I could give from my experience;

  1. Get knowledge: the ecosystem today is easier to navigate unlike before, there are explainer courses,ethereum communities like 2077 collective, if you want to be technical/non-technical, the ecosystem is open to everyone , stay lock-in and get knowledge.
  2. It’s not strange to experiment : as much as you can get knowledge from taking courses and watching tutorials, feel free to experiment and get an in hand experience of how things work that’s how you learn as well,Ethereum has a lot of dapps,projects and dev tools for builders and their is ‘testnet’ which is an experimental level before the mainnet of a project or token, so you can play around testnets like Goerli & Sepolia .
  3. Be wise : there are lots of ways to make money,connections,build reputation in the ecosystem and web3 space but then you could still get rugged ! Don’t follow team&project promises without doing your deep research. Your wallet and funds could get drained just by connecting your wallet to a dapp or exchange,it’s advisable to have your funds safe in a hardware wallet,then use your regular smart/non-custodial wallets to interact with projects onchain, so you don’t loose your funds by chance .
  4. Build the future you want to see : we have lots of better apps across defi,socialfi,tradefi,edutech in web3 today but we still need to improve the UX and onboard more users and economy onchain, this is not left for one person, get involved as a technical or non-technical contributor or founder and help bring the next billion users onchain . The space is big and together we can make Ethereum fun again,WAGMI .