Lecture Notes — Part I

Week 1 — Introduction

Students set up MetaMask, connect to Sepolia, obtain test ETH, and send a first transaction. The course introduces Ethereum, Polkadot/Kusama, and TON as practical ecosystems.

Week 2 — Cryptographic Foundations

Topics: hash functions, determinism, avalanche effect, collision resistance, one-wayness, SHA-256, Merkle trees, root hashes, proof of inclusion, and the birthday paradox.

Week 3 — Consensus Mechanisms

Topics: Proof of Work, nonce, difficulty target, Proof of Stake, Nominated Proof of Stake, forks, longest-chain rule, BFT, and mining simulations.

Week 4 — Wallets, Transactions, and the EVM

Topics: EOAs, contract accounts, Ethereum transaction anatomy, gas, opcodes, Turing completeness, Etherscan, and contract interaction tools such as Disperse.

Week 5 — Smart Contracts

Students deploy ERC20 tokens and NFT contracts, work with Uniswap, and study the DAO hack as a security case.

Week 6 — Smart Contract Security

Ethernaut is introduced as the main Ethereum security CTF platform. Students complete Level 0 and work toward Assignment 2.

GitHub Classroom Submission

Students submit assignments by accepting a GitHub Classroom invitation, committing work, opening a pull request if needed, and merging/updating their repository.