Online course
Foundation — Beginner developer
Twenty workshops, from how the internet works to a first chain-connected delivery, then the online "Blockchain Foundations Associate" certification exam.
Lessons are open to everyone: reading needs no account. Verified labs, quizzes, the exam and the certificate need a certified account.
Part 1 — Computing and cryptographic foundations
- BAC-L0-FOUND-101
How the internet actually works
A request's full journey, from typing a domain name to the byte that comes back — because you cannot reason about a peer-to-peer network without knowing what a packet is.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-102
Data structures and the cost of operations
Arrays, hash tables, trees: what each structure makes fast and what it makes expensive. The basis of every later argument about chain storage.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-103
Databases, logs and state
A distributed ledger is first an ordered log whose state is a projection. This workshop plants that idea before it becomes a blockchain.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-104
Hash functions
What a hash function actually guarantees — collision resistance, the avalanche effect, determinism — and the uses it does not cover.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-105
Public keys, private keys, signatures
Asymmetric cryptography as a mechanism of authority: what a signature proves, who can produce one, and why the private key is the identity itself.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-106
Merkle trees and inclusion proofs
How to prove a piece of data belongs to a set without transmitting the set. The structure that makes light clients and availability sampling possible.
3 h
Part 2 — Consensus and the anatomy of a chain
- BAC-L0-FOUND-107
Distributed systems: latency, partitions, consistency
Why a distributed system cannot guarantee everything at once, and how that constraint shapes every consensus protocol.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-108
Fault tolerance and Byzantine faults
Telling a crashed node from a malicious one, and why the latter is structurally more expensive to tolerate.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-109
Consensus families and finality
Proof of work, proof of stake, BFT: what each family buys, at what price, and what "finalised" means in each case.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-110
Anatomy of a blockchain
Assembling the earlier building blocks: blocks, headers, state roots, mempool, propagation. Where the foundations become a system.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-111
Accounts, transactions and fees
Account model versus UTXO, nonces, fees and priority: the economic machinery that rations scarce block space.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-112
Wallets, mnemonics and derivation
What a wallet actually holds — keys, never funds — and how twelve words generate a hierarchy of accounts.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-113
Nodes, validators and network roles
Who does what in a network: full node, archive node, light client, validator, collator. Confusing them makes any infrastructure discussion impossible.
3 h
- BAC-L0-FOUND-114
Reading a blockchain critically
Explorers, indexers and dashboards display interpretations, not raw facts. This workshop teaches how to get back to the verifiable source.
3 h
Part 3 — Developer tooling (level 1)
- BAC-L1-FOUND-115
Linux for blockchain engineers
The system every piece of infrastructure taught here runs on: permissions, services, logs, networking, diagnosis.
4 h
- BAC-L1-FOUND-116
Git, GitHub and open-source contribution
The submission channel for all Academy coursework, and the skill that makes a developer employable in a protocol ecosystem.
4 h
- BAC-L1-FOUND-117
Docker and reproducible environments
"Works on my machine" is not a result. Packaging a node and its dependencies so the lab runs identically everywhere.
4 h
- BAC-L1-FOUND-118
APIs, JSON-RPC and node integration
Talking to a chain from code: calls, subscriptions, errors, rate limits, and the discipline of never trusting a single source.
4 h
- BAC-L1-FOUND-119
TypeScript: the front end of a chain application
Building the interface that connects a wallet, builds a transaction and follows its status — without ever touching the private key.
4 h
- BAC-L1-FOUND-120
Smart contracts: fundamentals and limits
Solidity as a starting point, not a horizon: what a contract can do, what it will never do, and why the rest of the curriculum goes one layer down.
4 h