My DEFI diary— day 1: creating a Metamask account

This series is a look back at the last few months as I’ve made my way into the crypto space, and particularly into the DEFI space, as a complete newbie. I aim to catalogue the moves I’ve made, the tech I’ve experimented with, and the mistakes I’ve made along the way. I include some details around fees and logistics, hopefully to be useful to others wanting to follow in my footsteps.

4 March 2021 09:17 ETH @ $1538.37 — I created my first crypto wallet, using the Metamask wallet. I funded it with $41.55 from my credit card, $4.31 of which was eaten up in transaction fees. I can also see that it took 1 min 50secs for this transaction to be confirmed on the Ethereum blockchain. I did this as part of a course called Defi101 that I was studying through the Ivan on Tech Academy.

It’s actually only possible to do this retrospective in so much detail because of the nature of a blockchain. Remember that a blockchain is essentially a distributed, immutable ledger. So if I know my public key (my ETH address), I can go back and look at all of the transactions I’ve made from that address. You can go and look too — see here for the that first transaction where I created and funded my address.

Ethereum is known to most people as the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap to Bitcoin. What a lot of people potentially misunderstand is that Ethereum is actually a completely separate blockchain network to the Bitcoin network (and to be technically correct, Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain).

Ethereum is also the network on which a lot of innovation is taking place at the moment, because it makes it relatively easy to build ‘smart contracts’ — small programs that can run on the blockchain and can pass cryptocurrency back and forth based on how they’re programmed. This is why I had set up an account here, instead of going into Bitcoin as a first port of call.

It turns out that there wasn’t much I could do with such a small amount of Ether (or ETH) at that point in time. To interact with smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain requires one to pay ‘gas fees’ for anything that goes beyond just reading data. And as the network gets busy, those gas fees go up (a subject we’ll return to in a future post). So for now my crypto adventure went quiet for a few weeks…

Got any questions or comments? Pls post below — keen for this to be a two way conversation!