Guided learning path
Blockchain & Decentralized AI Systems Engineer
Learn how blockchain systems execute and reach consensus, build and secure smart contracts, reason about rollups and data availability, understand zero-knowledge and verifiable computation, evaluate decentralized AI compute/storage systems, and design AI agents capable of safely interacting with programmable wallets and on-chain protocols.
Accounts, cryptographic signers (secp256k1, Ed25519), Merkle Patricia Tries, state roots, and transaction execution flow.
Nakamoto PoW, BFT Proof-of-Stake, Tendermint/CometBFT liveness vs safety trade-offs, slashing rules, and P2P GossipSub propagation.
Milestone: Milestone 1: Blockchain Foundations & State
Master accounts, cryptographic signers, Merkle Patricia Tries, and BFT consensus finality.
Stack-based Ethereum Virtual Machine mechanics, memory vs storage layouts, gas calculation rules, and ABI encoding.
Checks-Effects-Interactions pattern, reentrancy defense, delegatecall vulnerabilities, oracle manipulation, fuzz testing, and emergency controls.
Milestone: Milestone 2: EVM Execution & Smart Contract Security
Understand EVM stack execution, gas calculation rules, and contract auditing patterns.
Optimistic vs ZK-Rollups, EIP-4844 blobs, PeerDAS, modular DA (Celestia, EigenDA), and cross-chain bridge trust assumptions.
ZK completeness, soundness, zero-knowledge, R1CS/PLONKish arithmetization, KZG/FRI commitments, ZK-SNARKs vs ZK-STARKs, and RISC-V zkVMs.
Milestone: Milestone 3: Rollups, Data Availability & zkVMs
Evaluate Optimistic vs ZK rollups, EIP-4844 blobs, and general-purpose RISC-V zkVMs.
Quantizing ML models into arithmetic circuits, ZK proof generation of neural network inference M(X)=Y, and computational integrity vs semantic truth.
GPU marketplaces (Akash, io.net, Render), scheduling, fault tolerance, and compute verification strategies (TEE attestation, redundant execution, ZK).
Oracles (Chainlink, Pyth), content-addressed storage (IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave), CIDs, and immutable AI dataset/model provenance.
Secure agent execution pipelines, Account Abstraction (ERC-4337, EIP-7702), session keys, Policy Engines, Story Protocol IP Accounts, and tokenomics.
Milestone: Milestone 4: Decentralized AI, zkML & Autonomous Agents
Build zkML verifiable inference pipelines, DePIN GPU orchestration, and ERC-4337 AI agents.
Required labs
Required projects
Path outcomes
- Architect end-to-end blockchain transaction lifecycles from signature generation to state finality.
- Implement smart contract security patterns to defend against reentrancy, oracle manipulation, and delegatecall risks.
- Evaluate Layer-2 rollups, EIP-4844 data availability blobs, and cross-chain bridge trust assumptions.
- Develop verifiable computation programs using ZK-SNARKs/STARKs and RISC-V zkVMs.
- Orchestrate zkML inference verification and decentralized GPU compute workloads with TEE attestations.
- Build secure autonomous AI agents with Policy Engines, Account Abstraction (ERC-4337/EIP-7702), and Story Protocol IP Accounts.