Welcome to the RAM Crypto School 2026, a specialized program conducted in collaboration with the Raising A Mathematician (RAM) Foundation. Join gifted high school students from across India to explore the world of blockchains and consensus, with a generous splash of cryptoeconomics!

Course Materials:

1. Tim Roughgarden’s Foundations of Blockchains (TR)
2. Elaine Shi’s Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains (ES)
3. Decentralized Thoughts

Coursework:

• Week 0: Pre-reading
  • The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine
• Week 1 (Sep 6): A peek into consensus and cryptoeconomics (through transaction fee mechanism design)
  • TR lecture 1.1-1.4 (An introduction to blockchains and the state machine replication (SMR) problem)
  • TR lecture 11.1-11.7 (Why transaction fee mechanisms?)
• Week 2 (Sep 13): Byzantine Broadcast and the Dolev-Strong, An Introduction to Mechanism Design
  • TR lecture 2.1-2.5 (Baby steps to solving the SMR- Byzantine Broadcast and the Dolev Strong)
  • Lecture 2 and lecture 3 from Tim Roughgarden’s CS364A (Incentivizing users to be truthful and Myerson’s lemma)
• Week 3 (Sep 20): Necessity of Cryptography for Consensus and Revenue Optimization
  • TR lecture 3.1-3.3 (The PSL-FLM impossibility and the importance of PKI)
  • A quick introduction to integration by parts
  • Lecture 5 from Tim Roughgarden’s CS364A (Revenue optimal auctions)