EE 465: Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technologies (Spring 2024)

• Instructor: Saravanan Vijayakumaran
• Schedule: Slot 4, Monday (11:30am - 12:25pm), Tuesday (8:30am - 9:25am), and Thursday (9:30am - 10:25am)
• Location: EEG 401 (Collaborative Classroom)

Slides

• Bitcoin Introduction
• Bitcoin Transactions
• Group Theory
• Projective Geometry
• Elliptic Curves
• Are Cryptocurrencies Useful?
• Mining Miscellanea
• Ethereum Introduction
• Ethereum Data Structures and Encoding
• Ethereum Transactions
• Ethereum Virtual Machine
• Ethereum Blocks
• Solidity Tutorial
• JavaScript and Node.js Tutorial
• Consensus Protocols
• Tendermint Protocol
• Ethereum PoS Protocol
• Tornado Cash
• circom
• Ethereum Rollups
• Monero

Course Content

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
  • Proof-of-Stake Consensus
  • Smart Contracts
  • Decentralized applications
• Blockchain Privacy
  • Zcash
  • Monero
  • Tornado Cash
  • Umbra Cash
• Blockchain Scalability
  • Layer 2 Technologies
  • Optimistic Rollups
  • Validity Rollups aka ZK Rollups
  • Validiums
  • Data Availability Sampling
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  • Goldwasser-Micali-Rackoff 1985
  • Succinct Non-interactice Arguments of Knowledge (SNARKs)
  • Rank-1 Constraint Systems (R1CS)
  • Domain Specific Languages for R1CS
    • Circom
    • Bellperson
  • Groth16
  • Trusted setup ceremonies
  • Universal SNARKs
    • PLONK
    • Halo2 framework for writing PLONK circuits
  • Transparent SNARKs
    • Spartan
    • STARKs

Prerequisites

EE 720 or CS 406

Grading Policy

• Relative grading
• No audits
• 40% Assignments, 50% Exams, 10% Attendance
• Assignments
  • Assignment submission via GitHub classroom
  • Assignments will involve programming in
    • Python
    • Solidity
    • Javascript
    • Rust
    • Circom
• Exams
  • A few sheets of notes will be allowed in exams
• Attendance
  • 0.3 marks per attended lecture upto a maximum of 10 marks

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