INTERMEDIATECOURSE

Crypto + Web 3 for Creatives

Our crypto course shows you how to code websites that interact with the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts in a practical, real-world, no-hype, no-BS, ethical way.

Taught by

Rik Lomas

Crypto is one of largest shifts in how the web works in decades... to the point where people are calling this new phase 'Web 3', but what is this shift and why is it happening?

Crypto lets data be completely decentralized so that there isn't one company or service holding all the cards. If, say, Instagram shuts down tomorrow, all your Instagram data is lost forever... this does not happen with crypto as everything is permanently stored online publicly. This lets us as creatives make brand new concepts that were previously thousands of lines of complex coding much simpler (or concepts that just didn't exist at all!). Crypto lets you remix projects like never before and for us, it's one of the largest movements since the open source movement.

View this course's environmental and ethical policies

What you’ll learn

How to create your own custom NFT platform and let people mint, buy and sell directly from you
How to move from standard web technologies ("Web 2.0") to Web 3 technology
How to create a decentralized social network that allows you to connect your digital wallet to websites, allowing you to log in without needing a back-end service
How to create your own digital currency for a social network where people can tip each other and have access to features based on how much of the social network's currency they have
How to create your own smart contracts, test them, and deploy them to Ethereum
Learn how to work with React.js, Next.js, Solidity and more!

Requirements

All the tooling that we need for this course is completely free to download. You may want to buy some Ethereum to deploy any projects to the main Ethereum blockchain, but this isn't necessary for this course.

VS Code or a code editor of your choosing
Metamask – a digital wallet which is installed as a browser extension
A Github account to store your code online
A Vercel account to host your final websites
An Infura account to let people who don't have a digital wallet interact with your sites

Target Audience

Anyone who wants to better understand how to incorporate Web 3 and crypto techniques into coding websites.

We recommend you already have some front-end experience building websites with HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to get the most out of this course. Starting with our Foundation HTML, CSS + JS course and Javascript for Designers course will be sufficient.

Most of our students work in the creative and tech industries, but you can work in any industry to join the course. This is not a get-rich-quick type course but a course for adding value to the internet and its communities.

Chapter 01

Chapter 1

In this first project you'll add a tip jar to a portfolio website – a super simple way to accept money without having to use PayPal, Stripe, or any other payment gateway.

We'll lay the groundwork on what exactly crypto is, why we would use Ethereum, how to connect a digital wallet to the Ethereum blockchain, and how to transfer Ether payments to other digital accounts.

Lesson 01

Welcome to the Crypto + Web 3 for Creatives course

Lesson 02

VS Code and running a live server

Lesson 03

Explaining the HTML and CSS

Go to chapter

Chapter 02

Chapter 2

Potstop is a completely decentralized social network – one of the under-appreciated and under-hyped benefits of building on the Ethereum blockchain is the ability to have accounts that you can take with you. No more lock-in to a big company!

In a standard web project, we would need to create our own user account system but there's no need to do this with digital wallets. In this project, we'll be showing you how to connect your digital wallet to sites to allow you to login without needing a back-end service, how to verify if someone is who they say they are, and let our community tip each other.

Lesson 01

Welcome to Potstop

Lesson 02

Setting up our project

Lesson 03

Installing Node.js and Yarn

Go to chapter

Chapter 03

Chapter 3

Smart payments! For us, the most exciting thing about crypto is the ability to make complex payments really simple. We'll be launching a band's new album as a 100-copy limited edition with 20% of revenue going to charity.

In the past, this would be thousands of lines of code and you'd usually have to integrate a third party API like Stripe. Now it's only 40-odd lines and a million times more readable.

Lesson 01

Welcome to Prism!

Lesson 02

Setting up the project with Solidity and Truffle

Lesson 03

Initializing the project with Truffle

Go to chapter

Chapter 04

Chapter 4

NFTs – you may have heard of these... For some, they're the next big way to own things; for others, they're for others who want to spend money on JPGs. However, there's more to NFTs than this.

Even if you hate or don't grasp the reasoning for buying digital art, the concept of being able to prove ownership of a digital item will get more common. For example, we don't do this yet but we could offer our students digital certificates of completion to prove they finished this course to an employer.

In this project, we'll create our own NFT platform and let people own a part of our project.

Lesson 01

Welcome to Planetary

Lesson 02

Setting up our project

Lesson 03

Setting up Truffle with Ganache

Go to chapter

Chapter 05

Chapter 5

Crypto communities and DAOs like Friends With Benefits let their members join by buying their very own digital currency called $FWB. These 'coins' are built on top of the Ethereum blockchain but the value of the currency is totally up to you and your community!

In this project, we'll create our own photography community built on top of our own coin, the $WIP, which we can send to others for being strong community members. We will also set up thresholds so your members need a set number of $WIP to access certain features.

Again, in a standard 'web-app' site, this kind of site build would be thousands of lines of complex code, whereas with crypto and Web 3 technology, we can not only make these communities a lot quicker but it also allows others to build projects that work on top of our very own digital currency too!

Lesson 01

Welcome to W-I-P

Lesson 02

Project setup

Lesson 03

Truffle init

Go to chapter

Get access to Crypto + Web 3 for Creatives

Practical, go-at-your-own pace learning, with help from our industry experts and experienced teachers
Projects and code that you can alter and include in your own sites and portfolio
Resources to get you started and going post-course

Your instructor

Rik Lomas

Founder + CEO

Rik (he/him) is a Mancunian coder, teacher and CEO of SuperHi. He was the co-founder of Steer (a code school in London) and has taught several thousand people to code. He is a bit too old to be posting memes on our social media and recently featured as a Sour Patch Kid in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.