In this fourth module, we'll talk about joining the world of DeFi. I've got two components. Number one is to set up your wallet, and I'll go through step-by-step how to do that. Then the second part, which is much more involved and longer, is to bring you up to speed with what I call the blockchain tech big picture. I will go through a list of different items that are important to understand within this space. For example, we're going to show how to set up an address in Ethereum. But where does that address come from? It's very important in this learning experience that you understand where stuff actually comes from, that's my job, and we will go into considerable detail. Let's start with the MetaMask wallet. This is something that is very easy to download, this is a wallet. What is a wallet? Well, a wallet is a place that you store your private keys. This is going to be a mechanism also whereby we can interact with the various different profile in decentralized finance. This is a very important starting point. I will go through how to do this on a mobile phone, but you could also do this on a desktop, so there are different ways to actually do this. Of course, you can have more than one version of this. Just like you can have two passes or two wallets, you can have two MetaMask wallets, I actually have two. Let's go through, what we're going to do. The first thing, go to the App Store or the Google Play Store and download, MetaMask. Click Get Started, Create new wallet, and you're going to create a new account by putting in a password. You choose that, you don't actually have to give information about you in detail. It's not like establishing a bank account or a brokerage account where you've got to give a lot of private information, no, this is very straightforward to do. One important thing will be a secret backup phrase. You'll be prompted to actually do that, and I highly recommend that you put that somewhere that is not on a computer. This is something that effectively somebody could use to essentially steal your private keys. That seed phrase is very important to keep that outside of the Internet in particular. You actually put that in and you're going to see an interface, something like this and I'll go through a few of these things. number 1, there's a network and the default is Ethereum Main Network, sometimes called the Main Net. If you're new to DeFi, you're going to have zero balance. You just set this wallet up, there is nothing there. We're going to talk not just about the main network, but we're also going to talk about a test network called the Ropsten Test Network, and most of the stuff that we do in my course is based upon the test network. The test network is an identical copy of the real main net. Any contract that works on the test network must work on the main network. But it's a great way to operate on the test net where the Ethereum has no value, and you can basically kick the tires, try to find bugs, and operate in this test net. The main network is where Ethereum, all of the smart contracts that are operational, the world that defy, exist mainly on Ethereum. I've emphasized that there are other blockchains that are available today that are operating decentralized finance apps, so that's clear, but most of them are based upon Ethereum. That's the network. Again, this test network is extremely useful in terms of what we do. I'd mentioned that I create a token in my course. Well, this token is created on the test network. The token creation code, that smart contract, could be deployed to the mainnet. But the advantage of the testnet is that there's no gas or no fees, and everybody, as I'll show you, can get Ether for free. On the testnet, it doesn't have any value, but you can get it from a faucet, and that's exactly what we're going to do in setting you up. Number 2 that is in red, that is basically telling your account. That's your Ethereum public address. We'll talk about this in considerable detail in a few minutes where that actually comes from. Balance and just setting up this wallet. The balance here is zero but it might not be zero if you've actually put something into your MetaMask wallet. What we can do here is if we want to check the balance, we can do transfers, many different possibilities using this particular wallet. There's also a possibility here that you've got some Ethereum in another wallet that you want to transfer to your MetaMask wallet. The app allows you to do this in a very straightforward way, so you can literally receive. The transaction history is also available in the wallet, and this is where you can see a pending transaction. When you do a transaction, it will be pending. Remember, we talked about the memory pool, so it'll be pending until it's approved and goes into the blockchain, which would be the testnet blockchain in this particular example if you're using the Ropsten testnet. This is what it looks like in terms of an actual transaction. We need to get some test Ethereum into our wallet. You'll see for any transaction, you've got the confirm or reject. You might type something in incorrectly, it would reject it, but if you want to do this, you would hit "Confirm." It calculates the gas fees. Everything is within this particular wallet, so it's very nice to do. The next thing is we need to get some test Ether. We're going to open the MetaMask wallet. We're going to switch to the testnet, and then basically click on the amount of Ether you have, which is zero, and then we're going to click "Receive." You're going to copy your public address, that's step number 5. Then we're going to go to a website , so the faucet.ropsten.be. You're going to paste your address in and basically send me some Ether. Don't do this a lot. Do it for a modest amount. If you just keep on doing this, then you're taking advantage of the system. Indeed, you might be blocked for a while, and you don't need that much to start things off. Basically, you can close this up once you're done. Then you can look at the status and will be used as Etherscan. Again, this system is completely transparent. Every single transaction in the entire history of Ethereum, is captured in Etherscan, both what is in the actual system and what is pending in the system. You can see, you can wait until it's actually confirmed. Then when you go back to your wallet, you will see that your wallet has got these Test ETH in them. This is a great exercise to start things off, to get in to the world of ETH. If you've got a friend that's interested, they should do the same thing, take the same steps. What I would like you to do, is to do a transfer. To send some of your Test ETH to your friend. To do that, you will need their public address. You should share public addresses, then send something to your friend and your friend can send something to you back. This is, again, fairly straightforward, if there's issues look to YouTube videos on this. But this is your ticket to get into this space. Even though you're playing on the Testnet, this is 100 percent rock-solid wallet that can be used for real Ethereum transactions and any other ERC-20 Token. My Ethereum MetaMask wallet, it's got Ethereum in it, it's got USDC, it's got [inaudible], it's got many tokens that I have in my wallet. It's very general. In terms of troubleshooting, there's a few things, you would do the entire thing on a desktop or so, or a laptop. Again, I've got different accounts or different wallets based upon the machine that I actually have. Indeed, if you do that, if you set up a separate account which you can, on a desktop, then you can do the transfer from your mobile to your desktop and vice versa. That's a good exercise to do. It's also possible to import from one wallet to the other. What if you forget your password in MetaMask? The MetaMask password can be a pretty simple password, doesn't have to be as strong password. But if you forget your password, then you can basically recover everything by importing the seed phrase. That's why it's really important not to loose that seed phrase. Then maybe the last thing that I'll mention is, what happens if you forget your password and forget your seed phrase? Well, that's very bad news. Because that means you've lost whatever it was in your wallet. Now, if you only have an account with ETH in the Testnet, then you've lost nothing, because you can just go and do the whole process again. However, if you've got real ETH and ERC-20 Tokens, you lose your password, you lose your backup seed phrase, you've lost your private key. That gets you into the world of, if I do this, try to do some transfers and this is the only way that you'll really understand what's going on, I can push some slides, you can listen to me, you can do the quiz questions, but you need to be actually involved in the space, you need to have a wallet. Before my students get into my course, a pre assignment is to set up a wallet and to load in some Test ETH into that wallet. Because we use that wallet throughout the course. You have to do it. I think it's very important. This is the way to join the world of ETH.
