All right. 1
We're going to get started by building our first Defi or decentralized finance app. 2
And in the process, we're going to learn how to program for the Internet computer using the Motoko 3
language. 4
The project that we're going to be building is somewhat inspired by the compound protocol, which is 5
what's called a money market protocol. Basically compound that allows people to lend and borrow their 6
tokens. 7
So, for example, people can supply their ether and earn a little bit of interest on it, or people 8
can borrow a token, say the chainlink token, and bet that the tokens price will have gone down by 9
the time they repay their loan. 10
Essentially, compound will collect the interest paid by the borrowers and pay out that interest to 11
the lenders of that token while also taking a small fee for the service. 12
So for our first project, we're going to write the code to earn interest on a token balance in the 13
token. 14
So what is Motoko? 15
Nope, we're not talking about Ghost in the Shell here. 16
We're actually talking about a programming language that was designed and created by the Dfinity team, 17
led by Andreas Rossberg, who was one of the original co-creators of Webassembly. 18
Motoko was designed to be a modern, general purpose programming language, and it's a language that 19
you can use specifically to create Internet computer smart contracts. 20
And as we start using it, you'll notice that there's a lot of similarities to other programming languages 21
that you might already know for example, JavaScript or Swift or TypeScript or C# or Java. 22
And as we start building more applications using Motoko, you can see that it's pretty easy to switch 23
over from whichever programming language you've learned before. 24
And hey, as programmers, there's constantly new programming languages, new programming paradigms 25
that we have to pick up on. 26
And it's a great exercise in your program, the flexibility to be able to learn new languages quickly 27
and adapt to them. 28
Once you're ready, head over to the next lesson and we're going to get started learning all about Motoko 29
and how to build our very own decentralized application on ICP.