Blockchain Developer Course

Day 1: To understand Bitcoin, you need to understand money. In the first session we will take a look at the history of money, followed by the history of digital currencies in particular. Then we will get familiar with hands-on exercises with the Bitcoin CLI and its JSON-RPC API. Day 2: Without cryptography, there would be no Blockchain. Before we do anything with wallets or transactions, we need to understand key cryptographic concepts. We will cover hash functions, the discrete logarithm problem, public-private key cryptography and basic elliptic curve cryptography. We will use Python to apply these concepts in practice.

Day 3: We need to prevent anyone from double-spending, censoring, or tampering with the money supply and transactions. We will learn how the Blockchain is used to accomplish this, how mining works and what is the structure of a block. We will build a script to simulate Bitcoin mining to understand how a block is made and how proof of work works. Day 4 - Transactions: Transactions are the most important part of any Blockchain. Everything else is designed to ensure that transactions can be created, propagated on the network, validated, and finally added to the global ledger of transactions. In this lesson, we will learn the internal structure of Bitcoin transactions, transaction inputs and outputs, and use the Bitcoin CLI to explore how to make and send a Bitcoin transaction manually. Day 5 - Transactions continued, Consensus, Forks, P2P network: Following up on the previous session, we will send transactions with Python wallet. This means programmatically composing a transaction from unspent transaction outputs, signing the transaction with our private key and broadcasting it to the network. Additionally, we will look at what “consensus” means in the context of blockchain, how blockchain forks and upgrades work, the P2P network and finally bring it all together with a simplified blockchain simulation.

Day 6 - Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) Wallets, Passphrases, Backups: The most important piece of user interaction with a blockchain is the wallet. We will look at how wallets are generated, backed up and restored, what mnemonic seeds are made of, and implement all this functionality with Python. Day 7 - Address encoding, Derivation paths and chaincodes, Hardened keys, Gap limits: Using what we learned in the last session, we will build a simple Python command line application that will generate a wallet for the user, show them a mnemonic sentence backup, let them import this backup to restore their wallet and generate addresses to receive bitcoins.

Day 8 - Ethereum blockchain basics, Accounts, EVM, Transactions: In this lesson we will start looking at Ethereum and how the concepts we’ve learned apply to Ethereum wallets and accounts. We will understand how the Ethereum Blockchain and Ethereum transactions are different from Bitcoin and how to use Ethereum as a developer to interact with smart contracts. We will start with low level deployment with the Solidity solc compiler and geth (go-ethereum) only, without any advanced developer tools. Day 9 - Smart contract common patterns, Development toolchain, Upgradable contracts: For a newcomer, the Ethereum development toolchain can be quite complex and overwhelming. We will get started by setting up a development environment using Hardhat, an Ethereum development environment. Using our setup, we will look at smart contract deployment and how to build, deploy and maintain upgradable smart contracts.

Day 10 - Smart Contract Security and Best Practices: Ethereum smart contracts are a complex topic. A bug in your smart contract could mean the millions of dollars that someone entrusted to your code could be lost forever. We will write a basic token contract, covering the basic features of Solidity and how to follow best practices to write safe smart contracts. Day 11 - Dapp development: The most common usage for Ethereum is the “dApp”, a “decentralized application”. It’s time to build our own. A dApp is in essence just a regular web application, that can also interact with the Ethereum blockhain. We will learn how to treat the Ethereum blockchain as our dApp backend, how to index data from it and how to interact with it and display it in a frontend web application. Day 12 - Dapps, DeFi, NFTs, Topics of choice: In our last session we will look more in depth at the current state of Ethereum, DeFi, Dapps, Decentralized Exchanges, NFTs and how it all works. Plus, we will take a look at any topics of your choice that you would like to see covered that are not part of the main curriculum, or other topics of interest that we might not have time for during the previous sessions.