DeFi Bootcamp
Duration: 4 weeks
This four week course is a follow up to our flagship solidity bootcamp. You need to take that before taking this one. This class follows the same structure as our solidity class. We will meet as a class for one hour each week and have one on one code reviews weekly with the instructor. You will be very comfortable reading whitepapers after this course!
Curriculum
Week 1
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.
Week 2
Financial simulation is an important part of designing DeFi protocols and understanding the motivation behind the parameters chosen. You program stochastic volatility simulations in python and see how it converges to the black-scholes equation.
Week 3
We will learn (hands on) the lending protocols of Aave and Compound. We will also learn how to get flashloans from dydx. 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 4
This week we will study the three major automated market makers, Uniswap, Balancer, and Curve Part 1. We will conduct hacking exercises that enforce AMM concepts and build smart contracts that integrate with these.
Prerequisites
RareSkills Solidity Bootcamp
Being able to program in Python or another language for financial simulation
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.
How important is knowing python going in to this?
Important, but not critical. Week two will take a long time if you don’t know Python already, but you'll be able to pick up the parts you need along the way (just expect to spend the entire week working on the assignment). You may optionally use languages like R or matlab for that week if you prefer.