Instructors
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dawn Song | Ahmed Kosba | Jian Liu | Yupeng Zhang |
| Professor, EECS | Postdoc, EECS | Postdoc, EECS | Postdoc, EECS |
Volunteer Teaching Assistant
Tiancheng Xie
Lectures
Time: Monday 4:00–6:00 pm
Location: Soda 310
Piazza and Mailing List
If you are taking the class, please sign up for the course mailing list for future announcements. You can add yourself to the list by clicking the link and “Join group”. Be sure to be signed in to your Google account.
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Course description
Blockchain has the potential to transform many segments of the industry and society. In this course, we plan to cover advanced topics on blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptoeconomics. We will discuss recent research papers and techniques on scalability, privacy, different consensus mechanisms, attacks on blockchain and smart contracts and mitigation against them, applications of blockchain and smart contracts, and cryptoeconomics.
The course is 3-units, and will consist of several research paper readings per week, in-class discussions of the papers, and a large course project per project group.
Course intro slides.
Syllabus
| Date | Section | Topic | Readings | Talk | Deadlines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08/27 | Introduction |
Introduction and
Logistics
|
Kartik Nayak (Slides) | ||
| 09/03 | No Class, Labor Day | ||||
| 09/10 | Scalability | Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) Concensus | Dahlia Malkhi (Slides) | Team Formation Due 09/10 | |
| 09/17 | Block DAG Protocols | Fan Long (Slides) | |||
| 09/24 | Horizontal scaling
|
Jian Liu (Slides) | Project Proposals Due 09/30 | ||
| 10/01 | Non-PoW Consensus Approaches
|
Benedikt Bünz (Slides) | |||
| 10/08 | Privacy | Zero-knowledge proofs in practice
|
|
Ahmed Kosba (Slides) | |
| 10/15 | Secure multi-party computation (SMC)
|
Yupeng Zhang (Slides) | </td>|||
| 10/22 | Secure hardware |
|
|||
| 10/29 | Applications | Applications & secure contract programming | Ahmed Kosba (Slides) | Project Progress Report Due 10/29 | |
| 11/05 | CryptoEconomics | ||||
| 11/12 | No Class, Veterans Day | ||||
| 11/19 | Cancelled | ||||
| 11/26 |
|
|
Project Report Due 12/05 |
Class format and project
This is a project oriented class. Each lecture will focus on one of the research topics on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Each week, students are expected to complete reading assignments before class and participate actively in class discussion.
Students will also form project groups and complete a high-impact research project. The final project/deliverable will be a team presentation and a paper/report on the project.
Grading
- 20% class participation
- 20% weekly reading assignment
- 60% project
Enrollment information
Enrollment is very limited. If you require an authorization code to enroll in the class, please fill out this form. Accepted students will be given instructor codes to register for the class. Decisions for admission will be released on a rolling basis. Due to limited space, please apply as soon as possible.
Supplemental Reading
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies - Free introductory book available on website
Additional Notes
For students who need computing resources for the class project, we recommend you to look into AWS educate program for students. You’ll get 100 dollar’s worth of sign up credit. Here’s the link.