Hi everyone,
I often get asked by friends and family: “Where do I even start? Crypto feels so confusing. Is it even real?”
They say it with that half-laugh, half-doubt look.
Well, it is real. The entire financial system is slowly moving onto the blockchain. The technology behind crypto is not some side experiment. It is already happening, and you are still not late.
My name is Marija (Mari). I have spent the past 13 years working in crypto, and democratizing wealth is one of the main missions of my life. A lot of people who do not understand how this space works will never fully get it, and that is fine. I have lived and worked across China, India, Indonesia, Europe, and now the United States.
I got my start in crypto back in 2014 working on one of the early projects with John McAfee. Since then I have raised over $100 million for startups and advised more than 50 companies on go-to-market strategy, token listings, and everything in between.
Today I want to teach beginners how to actually start in crypto without getting lost or scared.
There are two main types of exchanges in crypto: centralized and decentralized.
Centralized exchanges operate a lot like traditional banks. There is a central company holding your money the moment you deposit. Coinbase, Binance, and Bybit are the big ones most people start with (choose the one available in your country). They are useful when you are new because they make it easy to buy your first crypto with regular money.
Decentralized exchanges are different. These are self-custody. Your keys, your money. Once you install a wallet like Phantom, Uniswap, or MetaMask on your phone, you get a seed phrase. That seed phrase is the only thing that gives you access to your funds. Store it safely offline. In this case you own your money, not a platform. No one else can freeze or control it.
The reality is simple: you do not want governments or banks able to freeze your money just because they disagree with your political views or decide they do not like something about you.
We saw this in Canada in 2022 when the government froze the bank accounts of trucker convoy protesters and people who donated to them. We also saw it in the UK when Nigel Farage and others got de-banked for their views. These are not distant stories. They happened in places people thought were safe.
But it goes deeper than political freezes. I kind of believe money should be separated from government the same way we separated church from government a long time ago. Corruption is a huge problem in almost every country. When the same people who print the money also control the rules, ordinary people always end up paying the price. We have seen it over and over. People in Argentina have lost their life savings overnight more than once because of hyperinflation and sudden currency collapses. The same thing happened in Venezuela, Lebanon, Zimbabwe and other places where the system failed regular people in a matter of days or weeks.
That is why self-custody is not optional if you want real ownership. I could go on and on in this section, but I believe this should be enough for you to understand the basics of why it matters.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and the rest are basically new decentralized internet infrastructures. You build things on top of them the same way people once built websites and apps on the old internet.
Each of these ecosystems has its own currency that you use to operate inside it. Bitcoin has BTC. Ethereum has ETH. Solana has SOL. And so on.
I already wrote simple explainers on the two biggest ones if you want the deeper background:
What is Bitcoin →
What is Bitcoin?
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Mar 2
Hi everyone, I decided to start a series of educational posts because I see a lot of misconceptions going around, especially around Bitcoin.
What is Ethereum →
What is Ethereum?
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Jun 29
A lot of people hold Ethereum without fully understanding what they own. The same was true for Bitcoin. I wrote a whole article on that if you missed it →
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