DeFi Bootcamp
For Ethereum Developers
Duration: 2 months | Pricing: Pay upfront $2,400 OR 2 monthly payments of $1,300
This eight week Defi bootcamp course is a follow up to our advanced solidity bootcamp. You need to take that before taking this one.
Like the solidity course, there is a strong emphasize on comprehensive top-to-bottom understanding.
Rather than cover several DeFi protocols at a surface level, we will deeply study only a few foundational protocols so that you will be comfortable tackling any protocol in the future of your choosing.
Course Structure
Whitepaper ➔ Quiz ➔ Coding
One of the goals of this course is to get you comfortable with reading DeFi whitepapers directly.
The temptation can be to search for nicely created explanations as a proxy, but this won't help you become an expert in the topic. Reading dense papers is a skill you will learn in this course.
To ensure you are learning well, each whitepaper will be accompanied by a quiz and a suggested method of study.
And of course, you will write code that interfaces with these protcols so you get a hands-on intuition for how they work.
Curriculum
Week 1-2 Oracles, MEV, and Frontrunning
DeFi Overview, Chainlink Oracles, MEV and frontrunning, forking the mainnet, and simulating transactions in Tenderly. We will study the chainlink whitepaper in depth and integrate smart contracts with chainlink pricefeed oracles. We will also deploy smart contracts on the mainnet and see front-running in action, and develop methodologies to mitigate it. You will go through the source code of chainlink to see the relationship between the proposal in the whitepaper and what is actually deployed.
Week 3 - 4 Lending Protocols: Theory and application
We will learn (hands on) the lending protocols of Aave and Compound. DAI will also be covered as it behaves like a lending protcol and uses many of the same assumptions and primitives. You will build a smart contract that allocates capital based off of current lending rates.
Week 5 - 6 AMMs (Automated Market Makers): Theory and Application
We will study two of the major automated market makers, Uniswap and Curve. We will conduct hacking exercises that enforce AMM concepts and build smart contracts that integrate with these.
Week 7 - 8 Chose your protocol
Now that you are comfortable teaching yourself about a protcol from the ground up, pick one that you are interested in learning about!
Prerequisites
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RareSkills Solidity Bootcamp
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Being able to program in Python or another language for financial simulation
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You should purchase the books DeFi and the Future of Finance and How to DeFi, Advanced as these will be reading materials for this course.
FAQ
How much time will this take?
Having completed the core solidity course, this will be easier, but many of the financial aspects may be unfamiliar. Expect it to be demanding like our Solidity course, be ready to allocate 20 hours per week at least.
I didn't take the core solidity bootcamp, can I sign up for this one?
Not likely. We aim to develop long term relationships with our students and they get priority access to the extended bootcamps. Since we keep the class sizes small, chances are it will fill up before newcomers have a chance. But if by some chance you do, you will have to go through the same admission process, and score very well on our solidity test.
Will you be covering DeFi Hacks?
We will cover some basic vulnerabilities, but that is not the primary intent of this course. However, understanding how DeFi works at the application level is an important part of being an effective auditor, since the most serious bugs tend to be business logic related. This course will help you develop a comprehensive understanding of the business logic of DeFi protocols.