5-Day Free Course · Blockchain

Web3 Blockchain Without the Hype

Blockchain consensus, Ethereum's account model, Solidity smart contract basics, wallet integration with ethers.js, and a frank assessment of where Web3 is technically mature versus where the trade-offs make it the wrong tool. No speculation, no token promotion.

5 days self-paced
Free forever
Text + external video refs
No signup required
web3$hardhat compileCompiled 2 contracts$npx hardhat test: 8 passing$
5
Days
30+
Code Examples
5+
External Videos
$0
Forever Free

No videos. On purpose.

This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on web3 you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.

Practitioner-tested, not vendor marketing

This course is built by engineers who ship web3 systems in production. It reflects how these tools actually behave at scale.

Code you can run, not demos to watch

Every day includes working code examples you can copy, run, and modify. Understanding comes through doing.

Links to the canonical sources

Instead of re-explaining existing documentation, this course links to the definitive open-source implementations and the best reference material on web3 available.

Completes in 5 one-hour sessions

Each day is designed for about an hour of focused reading plus hands-on work. Do the whole course over a week of lunch breaks. No live classes, no quizzes.

The 5 Days

Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.

01Day One

How Blockchain Actually Works

Distributed ledgers, cryptographic hashing, Merkle trees, consensus mechanisms (PoW vs PoS), finality, Ethereum's account model vs Bitcoin's UTXO model, and the properties blockchain provides vs what it doesn't.

consensusMerkle treesPoSaccount model
02Day Two

Smart Contracts and Solidity

Solidity syntax, state variables, functions, events, the EVM execution model, gas costs and why they matter for contract design, basic token contract (ERC-20 standard), and the Remix IDE for rapid contract development.

SolidityEVMgasERC-20
03Day Three

Testing and Deploying Contracts

Hardhat for local blockchain development, writing tests with ethers.js, deploying to testnets (Sepolia), contract verification on Etherscan, and the security patterns that prevent reentrancy and integer overflow vulnerabilities.

HardhatSepolia testnetEtherscanreentrancy
04Day Four

Wallets, ethers.js, and DApp Frontend

MetaMask integration, ethers.js Provider and Signer, reading blockchain state, sending transactions from the browser, handling transaction states (pending, confirmed, failed), and the UX patterns for Web3 applications.

MetaMaskethers.jsSignertransaction UX
05Day Five

IPFS, NFT Standards, and Honest Trade-Offs

IPFS for decentralized file storage, ERC-721 NFT standard, building a simple NFT mint, and an honest assessment of Web3's current limitations — throughput, UX complexity, regulatory uncertainty — and where blockchain adds genuine value vs where it's the wrong tool.

IPFSERC-721NFTtrade-offs

The best external videos on this topic.

Instead of shooting our own videos, we link to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.

Read the source.

The best way to deepen understanding is to read the canonical open-source implementations. Clone them, trace the code, understand how the concepts in this course get applied in production.

Three kinds of people read this.

Developers Evaluating Web3 Technically

This course explains what blockchain actually does and doesn't do, so you can evaluate whether it fits a technical problem — not whether the token price is going up.

Engineers at Companies Exploring Blockchain

When your company asks whether blockchain solves a problem, you need enough technical depth to give an honest answer. This course covers the real trade-offs.

Developers Curious About Smart Contract Development

Solidity is a real, deployable programming language. This course covers enough to write, test, and deploy simple contracts — without the speculation narrative.

Want to Go Deeper In Person?

The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers Web3 and blockchain development in depth — hands-on, with practitioners who build AI systems for a living. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).

Reserve Your Seat