CS 251: Blockchain Technologies

Course syllabus and readings

Every lecture is accompanied by readings that support and expand what was covered in the lecture.

Lecture 1:
Mon 9/22/25
(DB)

Intro to cryptography & cryptocurrencies [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Merkle trees

Bitcoin mechanics

Lecture 2:
Wed 9/24/25
(DB)

Bitcoin nuts and bolts [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Bitcoin Developer Guide sections: Block Chain, Transactions, P2P Network
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto

Lecture 3:
Mon 9/29/25
(DB)

Wallets: managing and protecting crypto assets [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Bitcoin Developer Guide section: Wallets

Consensus protocols

Lecture 4:
Wed 10/1/25
(DB)

Classical consensus: network models and properties of secure state machine replication (SMR) [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Helpful (short) blog posts: What is consensus? Synchrony, Asynchrony, and Partial Synchrony, The power of the adversary, The threshold adversary, Dolev-Strong Authenticated Broadcast, Consensus for State Machine Replication, Synchronous consensus lower bound (optional).

Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains pp. 9-17, 33-36, 55-63
The Dolev Strong paper (optional)

Lecture 5:
Mon 10/6/25
(DB)

Consensus in the internet setting: dynamic availability, Nakamoto consensus, and sybil resistance [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Security proof for Nakamoto Consensus.
Bitcoin's Latency-Security Analysis Made Simple, Section 4.
Flash Boys 2.0, Section 7.

Lecture 6:
Wed 10/8/25
(DB)

Accountability and incentives in consensus: proof-of-stake [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Foundations of Consensus, pp. 107-110.
Blockchain selfish mining.
BFT Protocol Forensics, sufficient to read introduction.
Resolving the Availability-Finality Dilemma.
Accountable Safety Implies Finality (optional).
Ebb-and-Flow Protocols: A Resolution of the Availability-Finality Dilemma (optional).

Ethereum and decentralized applications

Lecture 7:
Mon 10/13/25
(DB)

Ethereum: Decentralized Apps, EVM, and the Ethereum blockchain [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Lecture 8:
Wed 10/15/25
(DB)

Programming in solidity [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Solidity documentation.

Decentralized finance and economics

Lecture 9:
Mon 10/20/25
(DB)

Stablecoins and lending protocols [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Lecture 10:
Wed 10/22/25
(DB)

Decentralized exchanges [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Uniswap
The constant product formula, by Alan Lu
Introduction to Uniswap V3
YieldSpace: An Automated Liquidity Provider for Fixed Yield Tokens, Sections 2 and 3

Lecture 11:
Mon 10/27/25
(DB)

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value

Lecture 12:
Wed 10/29/25
(Guest)

Legal aspects and regulation (Miles Jennings) [pdf]

Readings:

Digital Asset Transactions: When Howey Met Gary, William Hinman
The SECret Garden, Hester Peirce
Staking Out New Territory: Taxation of Proof-of-Stake Protocols, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher
A Visual Guide to the Howey Test, Nick Grossman

Lecture 13:
Mon 11/3/25
(DB)

Other layer-1 architectures: Solana, Sui, Aptos [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Privacy on a public blockchain

Lecture 14:
Wed 11/5/25
(DB)

Privacy: de-anonymizing the blockchain and mixing [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Lecture 15:
Mon 11/10/25
(DB)

zk-SNARKs: what they are and how they are used for privacy [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

The Zcash paper, Section 1
Confidential Transactions

Lecture 16:
Wed 11/12/25
(DB)

Constructing a preprocessing zk-SNARK [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

The PLONK SNARK
Polynomial commitments, Section 1

Scaling the blockchain

Lecture 17:
Mon 11/17/25
(DB)

Scaling the blockchain: payment channels and state channels [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

The Bitcoin Lightning Network

Lecture 18:
Wed 11/19/25
(DB)

Scaling the blockchain with Rollups: Optimistic, ZK, based, native [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Holiday:
Mon 11/24/25

Thanksgiving

Holiday:
Wed 11/26/25

Thanksgiving

Final topics

Lecture 19:
Mon 12/1/25
(DB)

Account abstraction, bridging, post-quantum blockchains, and AI [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Lecture 20:
Wed 12/3/25
(Guest)

The future of blockchains (Arianna Simpson, general partner at A16Z)

CS 251: Blockchain Technologies

Fall 2025

Course syllabus and readings