Decentralized Payments, Contracts, and Finance for Humans and AI

Announcements

• CPSC 3640 will be offered in Fall 2026. The course website is now live with the schedule and logistics.

Information

Time/location

• MW 11:35am-12:50pm
• Location: TBA

Instructor

Course Staff

Platforms

• Canvas

Course Description

Blockchains provide a platform for humans to coordinate economic activity without relying on centralized intermediaries. Emerging standards such as EIP-8004 aim to extend these capabilities to autonomous agents, enabling AI systems to transact and coordinate through shared protocols. This introductory course explores such decentralized applications, including tokens, exchanges, lending protocols, stablecoins, oracles, decentralized governance, and emerging standards for AI coordination and interoperability. Students will learn system architecture, security intuition, and how to build and debug decentralized applications.

Prerequisites

Required: CPSC 201 and 202 (or equivalent), and a basic understanding of computer systems and networks.

Course Format

This is an in-person lecture course. Classes combine conceptual discussion with hands-on labs where students write and debug Solidity smart contracts and interact with live DeFi protocols. Guest lectures from practitioners may supplement core material. The course concludes with group presentations and a final in-class exam.

Assessment	Weight	Details
Class Participation	10%	Ongoing throughout the semester; includes in-class discussion and engagement
Homework & Labs	40%	~6 problem sets and hands-on Solidity labs, distributed roughly every 1–2 weeks
Group Presentation	20%	Teams present a recent research paper; presentations are a technical deep-dive (~20 minutes), scheduled during the final weeks of the semester or as fit in the schedule
Final Exam	30%	In-class final exam on basic conceptual understanding across all four units

Course Structure

This course is organized into four units that build progressively from foundational concepts to advanced applications at the intersection of AI and blockchain.

Unit 1 — Foundation establishes the intellectual and technical bedrock of the course. Students learn why decentralized systems are needed by tracing the history of digital money, examining the failures of trusted-party approaches, and understanding core cryptographic primitives. The unit introduces three paradigms for building trusted computers — Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), cryptographic proofs, and State Machine Replication — which recur throughout the course. A unifying framework positions both crypto and AI as middleware layers that enable trustworthy, decentralized decision-making pipelines.

Unit 2 — DeFi for Humans covers the major building blocks of the decentralized finance ecosystem as it exists today. Beginning with Bitcoin's breakthrough in permissionless consensus and continuing through Ethereum and smart contract programming in Solidity, students learn how tokens, stablecoins, decentralized exchanges (DEXes), automated market makers (AMMs), oracles, lending protocols, and cross-chain interoperability work under the hood. The unit concludes with an in-depth treatment of security: smart contract bugs, Miner/Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), privacy risks, and the fundamental tension between usability and security in key management.

Unit 3 — DeFi/Crypto for AI examines how blockchain infrastructure can serve autonomous AI agents. Students explore emerging payment protocols designed for agent-to-agent transactions, the role of TEEs in providing verifiable, confidential computation for AI workloads, and how decentralized infrastructure can underpin reliable AI pipelines. This unit engages directly with open research questions around agent identity, economic coordination, and trust without central authorities.

Unit 4 — AI for Crypto reverses the lens, asking how AI can improve the design, analysis, and usability of blockchain systems. Topics include using language models and formal methods for smart contract auditing and bug detection, AI-assisted protocol design, and AI as an interface layer that bridges blockchain systems with the physical world.

By the End of the Course

Students will be able to (1) explain the architecture and security properties of major DeFi protocols, (2) write and debug Solidity smart contracts, (3) reason about MEV, privacy, and economic security, and (4) critically evaluate emerging standards for AI agent coordination on-chain.

Lecture Schedule