Blockchain and Smart Contract Fundamentals Roadmap

Understand how blockchains work and write, test and securely deploy simple Solidity contracts on a testnet.

10 milestones · ~144 hours total

1. 1

   Cryptography and distributed systems basics

   ~12h

   Hash functions, public-key signatures, Merkle trees, consensus ideas and why double-spending is a problem.

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2. 2

   How blockchains work

   ~10h

   Blocks, transactions, accounts, gas, nodes and the difference between proof of work and proof of stake.

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3. 3

   Ethereum and the EVM

   ~10h

   Accounts vs contracts, the EVM model, storage vs memory, ABI and reading transactions on a block explorer.

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4. 4

   Solidity fundamentals

   ~22h

   Types, functions, visibility, mappings, structs, events, modifiers and custom errors.

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5. 5

   Development environment

   ~10h

   Hardhat or Foundry, local nodes, compiling, scripting deployments and using a test wallet safely.

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6. 6

   Testing smart contracts

   ~14h

   Unit tests, fuzz tests, mainnet forking and checking events and revert reasons.

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7. 7

   Token standards

   ~14h

   ERC-20 and ERC-721 using OpenZeppelin; understand allowances and what you should not rewrite yourself.

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8. 8

   Common vulnerabilities

   ~16h

   Reentrancy, access control mistakes, integer handling, front-running and unsafe external calls, with the usual mitigations.

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9. 9

   Connecting a frontend

   ~16h

   ethers.js or viem, wallet connection, reading state, sending transactions and handling errors in a React app.

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10. 10

    Deploy a dApp to a testnet

    ~20h

    Deploy a small voting or crowdfunding contract with a UI to a testnet, verify the source and write down its threat model.

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