Awesome DeFi Product Management

A curated list of decentralized finance (DeFi) product management resources

Table of Contents

• Product Management in Decentralized Finance / Open Finance
• User Experience and User Research
• Growth
• Analytics and Metrics
• Business models and pricing
• Courses
• A list of DeFi project lists for you to get inspired
• What to do if I have an idea, but no money and connections with VCs
• Getting a job
• Communities
• Contribute

Product Management in Decentralized Finance / Open Finance

1. Progressive Decentralization: A Playbook for Building Crypto Applications by Jesse Walden
2. Do Protocols need Product Management? by Kristen Stone
3. The New World of Product Management: When the User is the Customer by Rika Sukenik
4. Applications: today & 2025 by Balaji Srinivasan
5. Setting Up and Scaling a Crypto Company by Brian Armstrong
6. Fork Defense Strategies in DeFi by Ian Lee
7. The Web3 Sustainability Loop by Trent McConaghy
8. YFI A Tale of Fair Launch, Governance and Value by Daryl Lau
9. Request for Crypto Startups by Tom Schmidt
10. The Ownership Economy: Crypto & The Next Frontier of Consumer Software

User Experience and User Research

1. The Next Wave of DeFi Users: A UX Research Study by Gossamer
2. DeFi User Research Report by Consensys Codefi by Consensys Codefi
3. 4 Key Findings in CoinGecko's Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Survey by Coingecko
4. DeFi User Survey — The results & insights by dex.blue, Argent, Kleros, Kyber Network, Maker, Ren, Synthetix, and Uniswap
5. State of Adoption by IDEO CoLab Ventures, Decentral Park Capital, and other contributors.
6. DeFi Usage Numbers by Richard Chen
7. 2020: The Borderless State of DeFi by Binance
8. CoinGecko Yield Farming Survey 2020
9. 2020 Global DeFi User Survey Report by ARPA

Growth

1. Lean DeFi - Planting Seeds for Organic Growth by Stani Kulechov
2. Trader Insights: Yield Farming by dYdX Integral
3. Inside Yield Farming: A Beginner's Guide to the Latest Craze in DeFi by William M. Peaster at Defiprime
4. What is Yield Farming? by Cooper Turley at Zerion blog
5. COMP Growth Hacking DeFi by Ryan Sean Adams
6. Organic Growth in DeFi by Vadym Nesterenko

Analytics and Metrics

1. Dune Analytics allows you to create whatever analysis you want from smart-contracts data, build dashboard, and share it
2. Our Network, the newsletter about on-chain analytics
3. The Graph allows you easily get any public data from blockchain
4. DeFi Pulse. Here you can track one of the main DeFi product metric Total Value Locked (TVL) for exisiting dApps
5. DeFi Market Cap
6. Nansen

Business models and pricing

1. The crypto price innovation cycle by Chris Dixon and Eddy Lazzarin
2. Business Models in Decentralized Finance by Aaron Hay
3. How Much Does A Crypto-Vote Cost? by Joel Monegro
4. How to value crypto capital assets by Lucas Campbell
5. Crypto’s Business Model is Familiar. What Isn’t is Who Benefits by Jesse Walden
6. Towards a Practice of Token Engineering by Trent McConaghy
7. On Value Capture at Layers 1 and 2 by Kyle Samani
8. Diving into network lifecycle investing and more by Jake Brukhman
9. Stop Burning Tokens – Buyback And Make Instead by Joel Monegro
10. YFI: Frameworks for Fundamental Valuation by Andrew Kang, Benjamin Simon, Daryl Lau
11. A framework for token value flows by Jon Itzler
12. The rise of the Fair Launch by Brian Flynn
13. Fair Launches Will Disrupt Crypto VC by Ian Lee

Courses

1. Crypto startup school is the-first blockchain startup school that learns you how to build crypto companies (like YC startup school, but for crypto)

What to do if I have an idea, but no money and connections with VCs

Following the Lean Startup methodology, you don't have to have money to validate your hypothesis, but even though to build an MVP it wouldn't be superfluous to have some intital capital.

BUT what if:

• you don't know how to fundraise, you don't have money to start a project, and you don't have any connections with VCs
• you want to validate your idea directly through the market and not waiting for 1-2 years by building something, more likely, useless
• you don't want polishing your pitch deck at the early stage, but focus on your product

Well, good news, there are few ways how you can start realizing your idea easily

1. Hackathons

One of the best way to find a team, make friends, build an MVP, and get early feedback

• ETHGlobal is the main event series of hackathons in Ethereum ecosystem being held all around the globe

2. Venture DAO

New type of crowdfunding, community-driven VCs

• MetaCartel Ventures is a community run investment DAO, looking to invest in Ethereum DApps. They have top mentors on the DeFi market.

• The LAO is for-profit, legal liability autonomous organization

3. Grants

• Gitcoin provides a novel way of funding open source projects for public benefit with Quadratic Funding matching contributions from Gitcoin's fund sponsored by donors in the Ethereum ecosystem and community

• Moloch DAO is a community funding initiative focused on Ethereum ecosystem development

• MetaCartel is helping early teams get to the next level with grant funding and operational support

• Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies.

• Web3 Foundation is a non-profit organization that funds software development and research in the field of decentralized software protocols. It is the foundation behind the Polkadot ecosystem.

• ConsenSys Grants are also focused on Ethereum ecosystem accelerating

• Project specific grants: MakerDAO, Aragon, Aave

Getting a job

1. DeFi jobs contains all the jobs available at DeFi companies
2. Crypto PM jobs newsletter is an awesome newsletter that lists all product jobs in blockchain market

Communities

1. DeFi Product Management is a telegram group dedicated to UX, memes, analytics, and growth of DeFi products
2. Crypto PM group is building a community for Crypto PMs and serves as a Product hub for builders
3. Blockchain PM Community

Top Crypto Product Persons

• Jess Walden - Founder of Variant Fund, previously a16z, Spotify, founder of Mediachain
• Tom Schmidt - Partner at Dragonfly Capital
• Linda Xie - Co-founder of Scalar Capital, Previously Product Manager at Coinbase
• Brian Armstrong - Co-founder & CEO at Coinbase
• Hayden Adams - Inventor of the Uniswap Protocol
• Stani Kulechov - Founder and CEO of Aave
• Jake Brukhman - Founder of CoinFund
• Rika Sukenik - Product manager at Skale
• Robert Leshner - Founder of Compound
• Arjun Balaji - Investments @Paradigm
• Kristen Stone - Formerly crypto product manager at Coinbase
• Nick Sawinyh - Marketing at Bzrx & maker at Defiprime
• Alex Salnikov - Product Manager & Co-founder at Rarible
• Ashleigh Schap - Growth Lead at Uniswap
• Su Zhu - CEO/CIO of Three Arrows Capital
• Evgeny Yurtaev CEO of Zerion
• Brian Flynn- Co-founder of Rabbit Hole, prev product at Dapper Labs
• Chris Remus - Founder of Chainflow
• Felix Feng - Co-Founder and CEO Set Protocol
• Alexis Gauba - Co-founder of Opyn
• Itamar Lesuisse - Co-founder of Argent
• Will Warren - Co-founder of 0x; Matcha
• Antonio Juliano - Founder of dYdX
• Anton Bukov - Co-Founder of 1inch
• Richard Chen - Partner at 1confirmation
• Kain Warwick - Founder of Synthetix
• peter 'pet3rpan' - Co-founder & blood mage @MetaCartel Ventures
• Nodar - Co-founder of Zapper
• Kyle Samani - Managing Partnet at Multicoin Capital
• Chris Burniske - Partner at Placeholder

Contribute

Contributions are highly welcome! You can pull request or just text me (https://twitter.com/0x_vadym)

Do you want to discuss analytics, memes, UX, and growth?

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