Blockchain Development Roadmap 2024

Learn the most in-demand skill of 2024 and make over $100K with a remote job

Opportunity

The total cryptocurrency market cap is over $2.8 Trillion as of March, 2024. The average blockchain engineer salary is somewhere around $140k/year, arguably making it the highest paying industry for remote software developers. Given the current market and the wave of VC funding, the conditions are ripe to learn blockchain skills and bag a developer job in this industry.

Philosophy

The pay is great, the market conditions are great, the work is remote, you don’t need ivy league (or for that matter any) degrees to get in. But this isn’t why I or most people I know started working in crypto.

Most of us got in because we were frustrated with the current financial, governance and corporate systems, which

• don’t offer transparency

• don’t give individuals any privacy, and most importantly

• fail if trusted third parties in a system turn out to be malicious

I could go on and on about philosophy, but this article is a dev roadmap, so I’ll stop here.

Use Cases

To understand the basic use-case of blockchains and how they work, I highly recommend reading this article: A Blockchain Explanation Your Parents Could Understand.

To get into more use cases, there are broadly 5 categories that have real direct end-users as of March, 2024:

1. DeFi - Decentralised Finance

2. NFTs

3. Real-world Assets

4. Privacy

5. DAOs and Governance

Most other use cases are either

• within crypto (eg: staking for securing blockchains, bridges to connect chains, Layer 2 solutions to scale them, subgraphs to help web3 developers, etc) - these solutions indirectly serve the end-users, OR

• have direct use cases for end-users, but not seen real users yet/the tech is not good enough yet (eg: decentralised storage, AI, IoT). This category mainly consists of DePIN (decentralised physical infrastructure) projects. They have a lot of capital locked in them (high market cap), but most of the money is put in by folks as an investment, but not many people actually using the product.

Skills

If you want to work in blockchain as a developer, you can broadly work on 3 things:

• Full Stack DApp Development

  • This involves:

    • Smart contracts

    • Frontend: regular frontend dev skills + wallet interactions with smart contracts

    • Backend: Even DApps require regular backends with databases to store certain data

  • A lot of engineers specialise in one of the above 3, with an understanding of how all the 3 parts connect and work together as a system.

• Smart contract auditing (Security)

  • Companies need to audit their protocols before launching them. That’s where you come in.

  • You’d mainly be reading/writing code in the smart contract language.

• Core Infrastructure

  • This involves building the actual chain.

For beginners, the highest yield path would be to learn Full Stack DApp Development. This is because:

1. It is the easiest

2. It has the most number of job opportunities

The other 2 options have a high barrier to entry due to the technical difficulty, and also because companies take a lot of time to hire people for those roles.

Don’t be discouraged. A friend of mine who just knew basics of programming and blockchain got a security job at Openzeppelin (one of the top firms in crypto) after grinding hard for 6 months. He didn’t have any professional software development experience before that. All you need is a little bit of courage and hard work :)

Which programming language should I learn?

You mainly need 2 languages as a blockchain developer:

1. For writing smart contracts

   1. On the Ethereum blockchain (and other chains that use the EVM), you use Solidity.

   2. The other major language for writing contracts is Rust. It is used in Solana, Polkadot; and its variations are used by multiple ecosystems (Sui, Aptos, Cosmos, etc).

2. For building the frontend, scripting

   1. Frontend: JavaScript. This is standard, and essential for pretty much any frontend. You’d be using something like React.js to build the frontend app.

   2. Scripting: Could be the smart contract language itself, or can be something like JavaScript or Python.

In case you’re working on Core Infra, you’d be using a systems programming language like Rust, C++, Golang, etc. Again Rust is the most used language for writing a blockchain itself.

What I recommend for beginners is:

• Learn Solidity

• Learn JavaScript/React

• Learn basics of building a backend (using JavaScript)

Resources to get started

• In case you’re not familiar, understand how web 2.0 (normal internet) applications work

  • Watch: What is an API

  • Refer this to understand how frontend <> backend <> database work together: Notes App using React and Node.js

• Install your first Ethereum wallet: Metamask and get some Testnet tokens

• To get started with web3 dev, you have a few options. Note that I will only provide free resources, given I’ve personally never bought any course for learning tech.

  • If you’re a learner who prefers structured courses, the best one out there is Patrick Collins’ course.

  • If like me, you prefer reading articles and trying things on your own, start with CryptoZombies. Once you’re done, Refer the following resources and build a decentralised app of your choice.

    • Solidity by Example (also has a YT playlist).

    • For building web3 frontend (wallet connection with dapp): Viem and ConnectKit. Instead of ConnectKit, you can use WalletConnect or Web3Modal.

    • Keep the official Solidity and Ethers.js docs handy for reference and deep dives.

    • I recommend using the Foundry toolchain to write, test, and structure your smart contracts.

    • Use the Remix Online IDE to test run code.

• Somewhere in the first month of your journey, read the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers. If you don’t understand them fully, it’s okay. It took me 3 months and over 10 reads of the bitcoin whitepaper for everything to click.

• Now comes the most important part: build a full-fledged complex dapp using all your learning so far. Some ideas: Uniswap clone with multiple tokens; OpenSea clone with multiple NFT collections.

  • You must write all the smart contracts, frontend, backend on your own. Use subgraphs and oracles to fetch data and display it on the frontend.

Further Resources

Once you’ve completed the above steps, refer resources to deep dive in the Ethereum ecosystem:

• Ethernaut - for learning Ethereum smart contract security

• EVM Handbook

Or, you can explore other ecosystems. I’ve curated a list of programming languages used and their respective ecosystem/chain:

• solidity - evm

• vyper (python) - evm

• rust - solana (SVM)

• move - sui, aptos, etc (full list)

• ink/substrate (rust) - polkadot

• golang - cosmos

• cosmwasm (rust) - cosmos, sei

• cairo - starknet

• smartpy (python) - tezos

• ligo - tezos

• cadence - flow

• sway (rust) - fuel labs (evm)

• (zk circuit) circom - iden3 (any blockchain)

• (zk circuit) noir - aztec (any blockchain)

• (zk circuit) typescript - mina

• (zk circuit) leo - aleo

What Next?

• Get a grant from a web3 company and build some more proof of work. Refer my Blockchain Grants List.

• Participate in Hackathons: ETHGlobal, Devfolio, Polkadot, Solana.

• Apply to Jobs. Subscribe to this newsletter to receive my guide to finding remote jobs that pay over $100k/yr.

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