Rollups

Non-fungible token (NFT)

Ethereum

Bitcoin

Stablecoins

Proof of stake

Synthetics

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)

Algorand

Payment Channels

Constant Function Market Makers (CFMM)

Solidity

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Decentralized Exchanges (DEX)

Nakamoto consensus

Cryptographic primitives

P2P Network

Bitcoin system

Bitcoin safety

Bitcoin liveness

Scaling throughput

Scaling latency

Sharding

Side Blockchains

Streamlet and Hotstuff

BFT protocols

Longest Chain Protocols

Bootstrapping blockchains

Zcash architecture

Privacy bridge

Fair transaction ordering

MEV and PBS architecture

Principles of Blockchains Princeton University Fall 2022 This course by Princeton University provides a full-stack design overview of blockchains, focusing on Bitcoin's design, scaling strategies, and additional considerations such as privacy and finality. It features a practical approach, with students implementing a Bitcoin client in Rust by the end of the course. Blockchains are decentralized digital trust engines and are a potential replacement to “digital platforms” that we encounter in today’s world. Digital platform companies occupy 7 of the largest companies in the world based on market capitalization (eg: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent). Blockchains came into prominence through Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, introduced in 2009. In the decade since its inception, blockchain designs have evolved significantly, although the corresponding evolution of applications (beyond cryptocurrencies) have not caught up yet. In this course, we study a full-stack design of blockchains: we view the blockchains as a whole integrated system involving networking, incentives, consensus, application layer support. The course covers the foundations of blockchains, and is divided into 3 parts: in the first part we study the Bitcoin design in detail. Although very secure and remarkably incentive compatible in the real world, Bitcoin has very poor performance in many ways: throughput, latency, energy, compute, storage and communication. In the second part we study the various efforts to scale the performance of Bitcoin in all the different dimensions, while maintaining the incentive compatibility and security of Bitcoin. In the final part, we study aspects of blockchain design that were simply not considered in Bitcoin (e.g., privacy, finality). In the spirit of Nakamoto (who implemented and tested the Bitcoin client before writing the white paper), this course will be implementation-heavy. We will use the Rust programming language for our assignments and projects for the foundation component of the course. By the end of the course, you will implement a Bitcoin client in Rust.   The basic technical prerequisites are a background in probability and algorithms. Decent amount of software programming background is essential.  Supplemental reading:
- Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, A. Narayanan, J. Bonneau, E. Felten, A. Miller and S. Goldfeder, Princeton University Press. Henceforth termed as PUP (Princeton university press).
- [Introduction to Cryptocurrencies](https://nakamoto.com/introduction-to-cryptocurrency/), a basic online course by Haseeb Qureshi.

Principles of Blockchains

Smart Contracts

Attacks

Pricing

Bonding curves

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)

Oracles

Exchange integrated Oracles

Borrow/Lending protocols

Flash loans

Financial attacks using lending

Wrapped tokens and bridges

Liquid staking

Zero Knowledge Tech

Open Hedge Funds

COS 473: Elements of Decentralized Finance Princeton University Spring 2023 This Princeton University course presents an interdisciplinary approach to understanding DeFi. It introduces various financial instruments enabled by blockchains and provides a hands-on experience interacting with Ethereum's testnet. Topics covered include token transfers, market-making, oracles, and DAOs. Blockchains are digital platforms whose consistency and liveness are maintained by a decentralized set of participants. The popular blockchain platforms are programmable (i.e., support applications defined via a Turing complete programming language) and are permissionless (i.e., transactions on the platform are open to anyone; the bar to participate is very lightweight). The combination of programmability, permissionless access and the financial nature of the underlying token (e.g., ETH in the Ethereum blockchain) has led to tremendous innovation in financial products on the blockchain, broadly covered under the rubric of *decentralized finance* or simply DeFi. The purpose of this course is to introduce the various novel types of financial instruments enabled by blockchains, classified as “elements” of DeFi. The course is interdisciplinary since it covers both finance and computer science topics. Finance terms are introduced on a need-to-know basis and no hard prerequisites in financial engineering are needed. Basic background in computer science (programming) is expected. The course covers a technical discipline that is developing at a fast pace – course material in the form of slides and notes are provided for each lecture, but the students will be encouraged to read a diverse range of reference material (source codes, whitepapers, web forum discussions). Nine elements of DeFi are discussed:

1. Token transfers: native blockchain transactions
1. Market making via smart contracts
1. Oracles: importing external data
1. Borrow/Lending: banking functionality
1. Cross border finance: bridges, wrapped tokens
1. Stable coins: tying tokens to fiat
1. Synthetics and Perpetuals: self-adapting financial instruments
1. NFTs : digital collectibles
1. DAOs : tokenized governance

The pedagogical style is designed to provide a hands-on experience with the material. Each class will be divided into two parts: the first part will be a lecture designed to highlight the conceptual and algorithmic aspects of the material. the second part will be a lab activity designed to provide a hands-on experience and highlight the practical aspects of interacting with a permissionless public blockchain (Ethereum testnet). The basis prerequisites are a maturity with algorithms (COS 226), probability (ORF 245) and computer systems (COS 316). Background in blockchains (ECE/COS 470 and COS 495) and financial mathematics (ORF 335) will be helpful. Supplemental reading: [Decentralized Finance](https://defi-learning.org/f22), an online course on DeFi.

COS 473: Elements of Decentralized Finance

End-to-end encryption

Man-in-the-middle attacks

Public key infrastructure (PKI)

Merkle trees

Certificate Transparency

Anonymous messaging

Encrypted search

Smart contracts

Zero-knowledge proof

Zero-knowledge smart contracts

Web3

Multi-Party Computation (MPC)

Cryptocurrency wallets

Backdoor-resilient authentication

Federated learning

CS 294-163: Secure Systems from Decentralized Trust UC Berkeley Fall 2022 This graduate seminar focuses on the development of secure systems built from decentralized trust, including end-to-end encryption systems and secure collaborative learning. It requires a solid introduction to cryptography and systems. Topics include blockchain, smart contracts, and zero-knowledge proofs, among others. This course is a graduate seminar on developing (secure) systems from decentralized trust.

In the past years, there has been much excitement in both academia and industry around the notion of decentralized security, which refers to, loosely speaking, security mechanisms that do not rely on the trustworthiness of any central entity. In only a few years, this area has generated many beautiful cryptographic constructs as well as a tremendous amount of real-world adoption, through blockchain, secure custody of secrets, secure collaborative learning – and now forming the technical backbone of the movement on “web3.0”.

The course will cover topics such as decentralized ledger systems, decentralized authentication and access control, end-to-end encryption systems, secure collaborative learning through secure multi-party computation, and others. For concrete learning, throughout the class we will develop a decentralized trust stack enabling common decentralized trust applications (3 units).  This is an advanced course, requiring a solid introduction to cryptography (CS161 or equivalent) and to systems (CS162 or equivalent). There is no required textbook for this class. You can refer to the [Berkeley CS161 textbook](https://textbook.cs161.org/) to refresh on security concepts and [A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography](http://toc.cryptobook.us/) for cryptography.

CS 294-163: Secure Systems from Decentralized Trust

Cryptography

Cryptocurrency

Wallets

Consensus protocols

State Machine Replication (SMR)

Dynamic availability

Sybil resistance

Finality

Accountable safety

Decentralized Apps

Automated Market Makers (AMM)

DeFi Lending Systems

Crypto Regulation and Policy

Privacy on the Blockchain

zk-SNARK

State Channels

Recursive SNARKs

Miner Extractable Value (MEV)

Blockchain interoperability (Bridging)

CS 251 Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technologies Stanford University Fall 2022 Stanford's course covers a wide spectrum of blockchain and cryptocurrency concepts, focusing on technical aspects and engineering secure software. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the main case studies, and the course delves into numerous applications, including DeFi, NFTs, and privacy on the blockchain. The course covers all aspects of blockchains and cryptocurrencies, including distributed consensus, smart contracts, economics, scalability, and applications. We will focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum as case studies. The potential applications for blockchains and cryptocurrencies are enormous. The course will cover the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies, and distributed consensus. Students will learn how these systems work and how to engineer secure software that interacts with a blockchain system like Bitcoin and Ethereum. This course is intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. The course assumes a familiarity with computer programming. CS107 (Computer Organization) or equivalent is required. CS111 (Principles of Computer Systems) or equivalent is strongly recommended. To the extent possible, the projects will be done in Python and Solidity. CS255 (Introduction to Cryptography) is helpful but not required; we will introduce concepts from cryptography as needed during class. We will list external reading sources on the [course syllabus page](https://cs251.stanford.edu/syllabus.html). These readings will often serve to expand on what we will discuss in class. They are not a replacement for the lectures. They are also not necessary to be read before coming to lecture, but pre-reading can help in following the lectures.

CS 251 Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technologies

Common sub-topics include cryptocurrencies, cryptography and distributed consensus. By learning Blockchain, you can understand how these systems work and how to engineer secure software that interacts with a blockchain system like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Blockchain

Computer Science

Blockchain

Prerequisites

Common concepts