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:
Wed 9/23/26

Intro to cryptography & cryptocurrencies [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Merkle trees

Bitcoin mechanics

Lecture 2:
Mon 9/28/26

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:
Wed 9/30/26

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

Readings:

Bitcoin Developer Guide section: Wallets

Consensus protocols

Lecture 4:
Mon 10/5/26

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:
Wed 10/7/26

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:
Mon 10/12/26

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:
Wed 10/14/26

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

Readings:

Lecture 8:
Mon 10/19/26

Programming in solidity [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Solidity documentation.

Decentralized finance and economics

Lecture 9:
Wed 10/21/26

Stablecoins and lending protocols [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Lecture 10:
Mon 10/26/26

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:
Wed 10/28/26

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value

Lecture 12:
Mon 11/2/26

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

Privacy on a public blockchain

Lecture 13:
Wed 11/4/26

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

Readings:

Lecture 14:
Mon 11/9/26

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

Readings:

The Zcash paper, Section 1
Confidential Transactions

Lecture 15:
Wed 11/11/26

Constructing a preprocessing zk-SNARK [pdf, pptx]

Readings:

The PLONK SNARK
Polynomial commitments, Section 1

Scaling the blockchain

Lecture 16:
Mon 11/16/26

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

Readings:

The Bitcoin Lightning Network

Lecture 17:
Wed 11/18/26

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

Readings:

Holiday:
Mon 11/23/26

Thanksgiving

Holiday:
Wed 11/25/26

Thanksgiving

Final topics

Lecture 18:
Mon 11/30/26

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

Readings:

Lecture 19:
Wed 12/2/26

The future of blockchains (Guest speaker, )

CS 251: Blockchain Technologies

Fall 2026

Course syllabus and readings