Resources and Useful Links

List of Resources:

• GitHub Repository
• Moodle Class (used for homework submissions, quizzes, announcements, etc.)

Books and interesting reading materials

• Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains - must read book for blockchain protocol enthusiasts;
• Implications of Open Monetary and Information Networks - read to form an intuition about the need for blockchain and decentralized solutions;
• Bitcoin Whitepaper;
• Ethereum Whitepaper;
• MultiversX Whitepaper;
• State of Crypto
• Secure Development Workflow for Smart Contracts;
• DeFi Handbook — Introduction to Decentralized Finance
• Cryptozombies learning game

Virtual Machine

You can use any Linux environment (native install, WSL, virtual machine, docker environment, etc.) for the OS class. We provide Linux virtual machines with all the setup ready.

VirtualBox / VMware

You can download the Linux virtual machine from this link. You will need to log in using your UPB account.

You can import the .ova file in VirtualBox or VMware. Follow the instructions on the official websites for installation.

UTM (macOS >= 11)

If you are using an M1 Apple system, you will not be able to run the virtual machine using VirtualBox or VMware. You will need to use UTM, along with a .qcow2 image. You will need to log in using your UPB account.

After you install UTM and download and unzip the archive, you can import it using the Open existing VM option in UTM.

You can also follow the instructions for running the VM using qemu.