An educational guide introducing web3, blockchain, and smart contracts with a focus on Stellar's Soroban platform. The article provides a DeFi glossary, development overview, and highlights PaltaLabs' Create Soroban DApp boilerplate for building decentralized applications.
This comprehensive primer covers web3 and blockchain fundamentals, explaining how cryptocurrencies relate to blockchain technology and addressing common skepticism about the industry. It introduces smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps), particularly decentralized exchanges and DeFi services. The article includes a detailed DeFi glossary covering wallets, testnet/mainnet, tokens, staking, and liquidity pools. It outlines the web3 development process including local development with Soroban CLI and Rust, app hosting on traditional web servers, and compute/storage considerations. The guide concludes by showcasing PaltaLabs' Create Soroban DApp repository as a practical boilerplate for building full-stack dApps on Stellar.