How to Use This Course

Core principle

Start with a question, build a model, explain the mechanism, and learn the terms and tools last.

This principle determines how each chapter is written and how you should read it.

Most people struggle with Crypto in the same way: they memorize names such as AMM, TVL, FDV, and Rollup, then try to understand the relationships, and eventually know every word but cannot explain how they fit together. The order is reversed. A term is a compressed conclusion. Memorizing the conclusion without working through its derivation leaves the archive unopened.

In this course:

• Terms do not appear before step 6.
• Tools do not appear before step 7.
• When a term appears, you should be able to point to the previous section and say: That is the thing we just described.

If you do not feel that recognition at “What It Is Called,” you read the earlier steps too quickly. Go back and reread them.

Ten-step lesson template

Every chapter follows ten fixed steps. Its ten level-two headings are those steps:

After the ten steps, every chapter has two fixed sections:

• Takeaway Questions: Select the questions most relevant to this chapter from the Eighteen Questions, then demonstrate how to use them.
• Chapter Check: Open-ended questions with expandable sample reasoning. The reasoning is not an answer key; being able to explain your own reasons matters more.

Six content types

The ten steps fall into six content types. You will find each in every chapter:

Among these six types, the hands-on lab and AI lab are the easiest to skip, and the most important to do. Reading alone teaches “I know what an AMM is.” Doing a lab teaches “I know how much a large purchase can lose in a shallow pool.” Those capabilities differ by an order of magnitude in interviews and real decisions.

Eight capabilities

The course develops eight capabilities. The top of each chapter identifies the ones it practices:

AI's role in the course

AI is not a chapter added at the end. It appears in every chapter, always in the same role:

AI proposes hypotheses. You verify the facts.

Every AI lab therefore includes a checklist of things you must verify yourself. Each item covers a common model failure: invented data, outdated parameters, nonexistent APIs, or presenting correlation as causation.

AI serves five roles in the course, with six levels of capability. Constraints become stricter as it gets closer to money. See AI's Place in Crypto OS.

One boundary runs through the whole course:

Learning rhythm

Independent study

Choose a learning path and follow its pace. We recommend:

• Do one hands-on exercise per chapter. Do it immediately after reading. Do not save everything for the weekend; accumulated labs rarely get done.
• Submit one artifact per stage. The stage page describes the artifact. Artifacts are more useful than notes because others can inspect them.
• Go back one chapter when stuck. The dependencies are linear. If chapter 16 is unclear, you probably have not fully understood stablecoins in chapter 13.

Teaching

One chapter roughly corresponds to a 90-minute class:

Do not reveal the answer before “Your Decision.” A student's memory of making a wrong choice is ten times stronger than hearing the correct answer.

Levels and assessment

Completion is measured by Proof of Skill, not by finishing videos. Each stage requires an artifact that someone else can inspect.

Assessment uses seven dimensions rather than a single total score:

Learn on the 3D Chain Island

You can also walk through the same 72 chapters on the 3D Chain Island. Each chapter is a scene on the island and follows the same ten steps.

• Part A looks from ground level: an island grows from a village into an on-chain city, layer by layer—with a block-production hall, DeFi district, exchange plaza, commercial street, and agent workshop.
• Part B looks from the server room: the same island becomes a dark blueprint view—inside blocks, contract workshops, full-stack construction sites, DeFi engine rooms, infrastructure and security, and agent engineering.
• Subtitles, choices, term cards, and cases come from the site's prose, keeping both experiences consistent. Numbers in “What Happens” and “Change One Variable” are computed by models based on the prose.
• “Hands-on” and “AI Lab” display task cards in 3D. These steps require you to leave the course and use real tools.
• Beneath every chapter title is an entry to “Experience This Chapter on the 3D Chain Island.” Use the left and right arrow keys to move between pages, and number keys to choose options.

What this course does not do

• Provide investment advice. It teaches mechanisms, not what to buy. No chapter tells you whether an asset is worth buying.
• Promise returns. Wherever APY or returns appear, the goal is to train you to ask “Who is paying this money?”
• Take on your risk. Labs involving real assets use a testnet or an amount you can afford to lose entirely. This reminder appears in every lab involving real money.
• Chase trends in the main text. The industry changes its conversation every six months. These 72 chapters cover structures that still hold after the topic changes. Recent events belong in Hot Topics Explained. Each page demonstrates how to break an event down into mechanisms, states its verification date, and identifies details that will expire. See How to Keep Up with Crypto for tracking trends.

Conventions for authors

If you write chapters for this course:

1. Update curriculum data before writing prose. Chapter titles, central questions, one-sentence conclusions, core concepts, labs, and AI labs live in packages/curriculum. Set status to written, then write the MDX.
2. Include all ten level-two headings in order. pnpm test checks this.
3. Introduce terms only in “What It Is Called.” Describe the phenomena in plain language in earlier steps.
4. Include at least one Lab and one verify checklist in an AILab per chapter. An AI lab without a verification checklist does not count.
5. Avoid numbers that expire. A sentence such as “TVL is currently about $2 billion” becomes wrong within six months. If you include a number, state when and where you obtained it, or ask readers to look it up themselves—that is the purpose of the lab.