Announcements
- CPSC 3640 will be offered in Fall 2026. The course website is now live with the schedule and logistics.
Course Information
Time/location
- MW, 11:35am-12:50pm
- TBA
Platforms
Instructor
Office hours: TBD, TBD
Teaching Assistance
TBA
📖 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.
Course Units (click for details)
This course is organized into three units that build progressively from foundational concepts to the frontier where AI and blockchain intersect.
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: trusted-party approaches, e-cash and its problems of counterfeiting and double spending, and the challenges of censorship and equivocation that motivate consensus. The unit then covers Bitcoin’s breakthrough in permissionless consensus, payment methods in Bitcoin and efforts to do more with it, and Ethereum’s smart contract platform with programming in Solidity. It concludes with a unified view of blockchains as robust world computers built from faulty nodes through State Machine Replication, different virtual machines, and modular designs (L1s, L2s, and data availability).
Unit 2 — DeFi as new fintech for Humans covers the major building blocks of the decentralized finance ecosystem and the risks that come with them. Students learn how tokens, stablecoins, decentralized exchanges (DEXes) and automated market makers (AMMs), oracles, and lending and borrowing protocols work under the hood, along with opportunities that DeFi uniquely enables, such as auditing and formal verification and cross-chain interoperability. The unit then turns to risk: smart contract bugs, Miner/Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) and its centralization problems, payment privacy and confidential smart contracts, key management, and scaling performance with payment channels and rollups.
Unit 3 — Crypto for AI <> AI for Crypto explores the two-way relationship between blockchains and AI. In one direction, students examine how decentralized infrastructure can serve autonomous AI agents: payment protocols such as x402, confidential AI using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), securing the plumbing of AI, and identity, reputation, and coordination through emerging standards such as EIP-8004. In the other direction, the unit examines how AI systems participate in crypto markets, including trading algorithms and their privacy problems.
Prerequisites
Required: CPSC 201 and 202 (or equivalent), and a basic understanding of computer systems and networks.
Grading
| 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 | 30% | Students form a team to investigate a technical or societal topic related to the course and present to the class (~20 minutes), scheduled during the final weeks of the semester |
| Final Exam | 20% | In-class final exam on fundamental concepts across all three units |
Lecture Schedule
Section I: Foundation
Course intro: from digital money and programmable asset to trusted computer for AI
Nakamoto broke new ground in 2009: Bitcoin
Payment methods in Bitcoin
Trying to do more with Bitcoin
Ethereum and smart contracts
A unified view: robust world computer from faulty nodes
Section II: DeFi as new fintech for Humans
Tokens & stablecoins
DEX and Automated Market Makers (AMMs)
DeFi opportunities: auditing & formal verification
Oracles
Lending & borrowing
DeFi opportunities: interoperability
DeFi risk: bugs
DeFi risk: MEV
PBS and their problems
DeFi risk: privacy (traceable payments)
Privacy II: confidential smart contracts
DeFi risk: key management
Scaling up performance
Section III: Crypto for AI <> AI for Crypto
Payment protocols for agents (x402)
Confidential AI using TEEs
Securing the plumbing of AI (Props)
Identity, reputation & coordination (EIP-8004)
Trading algos, and their privacy problems
TBD (buffer)
Final exam (in class)