The whole level Start at the beginning 16 guides, about 3 hours 51 minutes of reading. Take them in order or jump to the track you need.

Start with guide one

Level 4 of 4

Is this your level?

For builders, researchers and auditors who want to reason from first principles.

Who this is for

You are building, auditing, researching or simply want to understand these systems the way the people who design them do. You are comfortable with a formula, a code snippet and a specification, and you want the reasoning behind the design choices, including the ones that are still being argued about.

Before you start

Comfortable with these? Then you are in the right place. If any of them are new, the Advanced level covers them first.

By the end

What you will be able to do once this level is behind you.

Reason about safety, liveness and finality across consensus designs
Choose between signature schemes, multisig, MPC and threshold setups
Explain what a zero knowledge proof guarantees and what it costs
Evaluate a rollup, a DA layer or a bridge by its trust assumptions
Estimate gas from first principles on the EVM and compute on Solana
Recognize vulnerability classes and design incentives that hold up

The tracks

Four tracks, in the order they build on each other

Each track stands on its own, so jump to the one you need. Read in order and every guide can lean on the one before it.

Track 1

Consensus and cryptography

How strangers agree, how signatures prove authority, how proofs replace trust, and how keys are split so no single device is a single point of failure.

4 guides56 minNot startedStart this track Track 2

Scaling architecture

Rollups, data availability, the EVM at the opcode level and the Solana runtime. Where the throughput comes from and what each design gives up for it.

4 guides61 minNot startedStart this track Track 3

The transaction supply chain

Everything between a signature and a finalized block: builders and proposers, smart accounts, cross chain messages and security that is borrowed from somewhere else.

4 guides57 minNot startedStart this track Track 4

Security and mechanism design

How contracts break and how that is caught before deployment, and how to design token incentives and governance that survive contact with adversaries.

4 guides57 minNot startedStart this track

Every guide

All 16, with the reading time for each

01Consensus from first principles: safety, liveness and finalityEvery chain answers the same question, how strangers agree on one history. The answers differ in what they give up.Expert16 min readConsensus and cryptography 02Signature schemes: ECDSA, Schnorr, EdDSA and BLSFour schemes secure almost everything onchain. Each one fails in its own characteristic way.Expert15 min readConsensus and cryptography 03Zero knowledge proofs for practitionersProofs replace re-execution with verification. Here is what they promise, what they cost, and where they break.Expert13 min readConsensus and cryptography 04Multisig, MPC and threshold signatures comparedSplitting a key removes one point of failure. The interface that feeds every signer can quietly become another.Expert12 min readConsensus and cryptography 05Rollup architecture: sequencing, proofs and exitsA rollup is an L1 contract with a very elaborate opinion about which state root to accept. Here is how it forms that opinion.Expert16 min readScaling architecture 06Data availability: blobs, sampling and DA layersA proof tells you the state is right. Only data availability tells you anyone else can check it, or leave.Expert16 min readScaling architecture 07The EVM under the hood: gas, storage and calldataGas is not a fee schedule to memorize. It is a model of what your code costs every node on Earth.Expert12 min readScaling architecture 08Inside the Solana runtime: accounts, parallelism and feesThe EVM discovers what a transaction touches by running it. Solana makes you say so first, and builds everything on that promise.Expert17 min readScaling architecture 09Proposer builder separation and the MEV supply chainBetween a signature and a finalized block sits a market. Here is who runs it, who trusts whom, and what the protocol is changing.Expert17 min readThe transaction supply chain 10Account abstraction internals: ERC-4337 and EIP-7702The account becomes code. Here is exactly what runs, in what order, who pays for it, and where it breaks.Expert15 min readThe transaction supply chain 11Cross chain security: bridge trust models and messagingEvery bridge answers one question: who says it happened on the other chain? The answer is the security model.Expert12 min readThe transaction supply chain 12Restaking and shared securitySecurity as a service is a real idea with real math. Here is the math, the mechanisms, and the places it can fail together.Expert13 min readThe transaction supply chain 13Smart contract vulnerability classesExploits repeat by class, not by line of code. Learn the classes and you can spot the next one before it ships.Expert17 min readSecurity and mechanism design 14How audits, fuzzing and formal verification workEvery technique answers a narrower question than people assume. Knowing which question each one answers is the skill.Expert14 min readSecurity and mechanism design 15Token mechanism design: incentives that hold upA token mechanism is code that runs on people. Design it for the day everyone optimizes against it.Expert13 min readSecurity and mechanism design 16Onchain governance: attacks, timelocks and delegationGovernance is an upgrade key held by a crowd. Measure who can seize it, how fast, and who can leave first.Expert13 min readSecurity and mechanism design

The ladder

Four levels, one path

Move up when this level feels easy, or step down a level whenever a guide leans on something you have not met yet. There is no penalty for either.

Level 1

Start the Expert level

Sixteen guides, about 3 hours of reading, and every one of them free. Your progress stays on this device.

Read guide one Back to Advanced

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Expert crypto: protocols, proofs and security