Intro to Blockchain and Cryptocurrency
Intro to Blockchain and Cryptocurrency
Program: Fintech
Format: 7 weeks · 13 sections · 62 minutes each
Meetings: Weeks 1–6 meet twice; Week 7 is a single demo-day section
Contact time: 13 × 62 = 806 minutes
1. What this course is
This is a Fintech course, not a computer-science cryptography course. We start from applications — a babysitting club that ran out of scrip, a remittance, a lemonade-stand market, a gift-card run — and only then open the mechanism.
You will leave able to sit in a product, risk, or treasury meeting and make a literate call on Bitcoin, stablecoins, DeFi, tokenization, and CBDC. Ideology is out of scope. Mechanisms, incentives, and licenses are in.
The through-line is a live project: you design a community money, issue it as a testnet token, and share it in the class system. Our running example is Eagecoin (ticker EAGE). Teams may use that name or another — but everyone holds classmates’ coins, prices them against instructor-issued CLASSUSD, and defends the design on demo day.
We borrow applications from MIT 14.129 (Blockchain and the Design of Financial Systems, Townsend) and labs from Lorenzo Naranjo’s Fintech notebooks. We do not assign graduate proofs.
2. Learning outcomes
By the end of the course you can:
- Issue. Design a coin with an explicit community, supply rule, and claim — and deploy it on the class testnet.
- Circulate. Move that coin through wallets, peer payments, and an automated market maker (AMM) inside a shared system.
- Measure. Use Python labs (hashing / proof of work, constant-product markets, peg risk) to treat the coin as a financial object.
- Judge. Decide, MIT-style, which pieces of the crypto bundle the use case actually needed (database vs chain, registrar vs consensus, token vs escrow) — and whether a licensed fintech should build, partner, or pass.
How we make the ideas stick. Every session notebook opens with Words we use today, runs Demo cells you execute, then YOUR TURN, and closes with Check you understand. The longer explanation — cafeteria / house-key / lemonade pictures, worked numbers, mix-ups, and a glossary — lives in the concept handbook. Use it if you missed class or a word still will not land (about 10 minutes). If you can only say “decentralized,” you do not understand it yet.
| Week | Ideas you should be able to teach a sharp 15-year-old |
|---|---|
| 1 | Three jobs of money · ledger · velocity · hash · signature · address vs seed |
| 2 | Block / PoW / verify · unbundle · price, index, beta · wallet vs ETF vs exchange tab |
| 3 | Smart contract, ERC-20, mint, cap, pause, gas · contract address is the coin |
| 4 | Unit vs rail · AMM x \times y = k · spot vs average · slippage · IL |
| 5 | Claim vs receipt · atomic DvP · money flower · netting a triangle |
| 6 | Peg, depeg, run · kill criteria with numbers · Howey-shaped facts · Travel Rule |
| 7 | Unbundle · go / partner / pass · live proofs in order |
3. Who should take this
Prerequisites. Intro microeconomics and intro finance (time value of money, basic financial institutions). Comfort following a Python notebook. No prior Solidity. No prior crypto required.
Out of scope. Writing production smart contracts from scratch, mining hardware, NFT culture as a core module, token-price forecasting, mainnet, or treating every database problem as a blockchain problem.
4. How class works
Each 62-minute section:
| Minutes | Block |
|---|---|
| 0–5 | Application hook |
| 5–25 | Mechanism — only what the application needs |
| 25–50 | Lab / build (notebook or coin-system step) |
| 50–62 | Debrief and the week’s project gate |
The instructor projects the class notebook. You run every Demo cell (it already works), then fill YOUR TURN (???) in the student notebook. Teaching scripts stay with the instructor. When a word does not land, re-run the Demo, then open the concept handbook (missed-class review) — do not wait for office hours to discover you swapped spot with average.
Hard rule. Testnet only. No mainnet, no real money, no public sale. Never put a seed phrase in a PDF, a chat, or on the projector.
5. The class coin system (Eagecoin)
Teams of 2–3. “Share in the system” means transaction hashes, not a slogan.
| Layer | Who provides it | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| CLASSUSD | Instructor (class unit of account) | Hold it, price against it, redeem into it |
| Team coin (ERC-20) | Your team — Remix + OpenZeppelin wizard | Deploy, cap, mint, pause, airdrop the roster |
| Wallets | Your MetaMask (or equivalent) | Publish an address; receive every team’s coin |
| Market | Testnet AMM or the class AMM notebook | Seed EAGE / CLASSUSD (or your ticker); allow classmate swaps |
| Circulation log | Shared class sheet | ≥5 peer payments + ≥1 external swap |
| Fallback | Python mini-ledger if wallets fail | Same economic design; say so in the log |
6. Schedule
| Week | Theme | Sec. | Session | Project gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A community needs a money | S1 | Community currencies before crypto | Teams + Coin Intent (A1) |
| S2 | Keys, wallets, receiving value | Address on the roster | ||
| 2 | A shared ledger | S3 | Build a tiny chain, then break it | Issuance spec (A2) + lab L1 |
| S4 | Markets: index, beta, access | Ticker / distribution freeze | ||
| 3 | Issue the coin | S5 | Smart contracts as coordination | Parameters locked |
| S6 | Create Eagecoin and airdrop it | Coin live (A3) | ||
| 4 | Share it in the system | S7 | Payments: unit vs rail | Circulation log starts (A4) |
| S8 | List the coin on the class AMM | Pool + lab L2 | ||
| 5 | Make it a claim | S9 | Tokenization: what is it a claim on? | Redemption rule (A5) |
| S10 | Public money, netting, many coins | Obligation matrix | ||
| 6 | Stress, then license | S11 | Runs, depegs, contagion | Kill criteria + lab L3 |
| S12 | If this left the lab, what license? | Compliance checklist (A6) | ||
| 7 | Demo day | S13 | Share the coin, defend the system | Memo A7 + demo A8 |
If the calendar has a 14th hour, Week 7 splits into presentations plus a sit-down exam.
Quizzes (required; 15–20 min, closed notes). Q1 at the open of Week 3 (S1–S4). Q2 at the open of Week 5 (S5–S8). Q3 take-home the night before S13 if demo day is a single slot (S9–S12). Bring a calculator for Q2. This offering treats quizzes as diagnostics unless the instructor announces they fold into the 15% gates.
7. Assessment
The coin is the exam.
| Component | Weight | What we look at |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly gates A1–A6 | 15% | Intent, spec, deploy, circulation, claim, risk/compliance |
| Labs L1–L3 | 20% | Class lab notebooks (PoW chain, AMM bowl, peg/kill rules); Naranjo optional extra |
| Design memo A7 | 25% | ~2,000 words: evidence, unbundle, go / partner / pass |
| Demo day A8 | 40% | Live transfer, quote, redemption, 8-minute defense |
A7 memo (required headings). Problem and community · Mechanism · Circulation evidence · What the market revealed · Unbundle the stack · What broke · Go / partner / pass · Sources (babysitting co-op or Sarafu; one Naranjo result; one MIT/BIS idea). No hype paragraph. No price prediction.
A8 live proofs (this order). Contract (network, cap, roles) → a classmate not on your team holding the coin → a pool quote → a transfer and a redemption → then the recommendation.
8. Readings (keep them short)
No single textbook. Cap assigned reading at about 40 pages/week. Full citations and links: concept handbook → Sources.
Spine
| Week | Must read (click through; do not substitute a recap blog) |
|---|---|
| 1 | Prasad, The Future of Money, Ch. 1–2 · Sweeney and Sweeney 1977 or Krugman 1998 · Mattsson et al. 2023 on Sarafu |
| 2 | Nakamoto 2008 · one spot-Bitcoin ETF factsheet (post the PDF in the LMS) |
| 3 | Ethereum whitepaper, introduction + applications only · EIP-20 · one stablecoin reserve/attestation report |
| 4 | Uniswap v2 Core (the constant-product pages) · Harvey, Ramachandran, and Santoro, DeFi and the Future of Finance, selected AMM pages |
| 5 | Bech and Garratt 2017 (money flower) · one RWA / issuer brief |
| 6 | Liu, Makarov, and Schoar 2023 (Terra-Luna run) · FATF 2021 VA guidance · MiCA or home-jurisdiction summary · Howey |
| 7 | Notes + A7 sources list only |
Labs (run ours; Naranjo is extra): clone the course GitHub, open notebooks/labs/. Same verbs as Lorenzo Naranjo, Fintech notebooks.
Use-case spine (not the PhD layer): MIT 14.129, Townsend, Blockchain and the Design of Financial Systems, Spring 2025.
9. Tools
Laptop every session. Python 3 + Jupyter (student-files/requirements.txt). MetaMask (or equivalent). Remix. Class testnet faucet. Instructor deploys CLASSUSD before Session 2 and keeps the address roster.
10. Integrity and conduct
- Labs: discussion allowed; written answers must be your own.
- Quizzes: individual, closed notes.
- A7: teammates may share logs and screenshots; the unbundle and recommendation must be your own words if the memo is individual.
- A seed phrase in a submission is a security fail (points off and a private reset), not a clever appendix.
- Mainnet deploy or a public sale for this course is a zero on the project.
11. Workload
Target 3–4 hours outside class per week: short reading, notebook cells (re-run Demos if you missed class), the session’s handbook pages as review, and the project gate. The memo is written across Weeks 3–6, not the night before demo day.
Fintech · application-first · Eagecoin (EAGE) · testnet only · 13 × 62 minutes