The Art of Blockchain Programming
Dimitris Lamprinos, Dionysis Zindros, Nikos Sfakianakis and co-authors
Before the early morning Japanese sun of January 4th has risen, the Bitcoin genesis block is silently mined in Satoshi Nakamoto's laptop. It is 2009. It marks not just the birth of a new currency, but the dawn of an entirely new engineering discipline. Blockchain engineering has since evolved from an obscure cryptographic experiment into a sophisticated field that demands mastery of distributed systems, game theory, economics, and cutting-edge security practices.
The migration of software engineers into the blockchain space represents one of the most fascinating career transitions in modern technology. Unlike traditional software development, where decades of established patterns and best practices guide our decisions, blockchains are a frontier where engineers must constantly balance competing priorities that have no historical precedent. Each technical decision – from choosing a consensus mechanism to designing a smart contract architecture – requires weighing tradeoffs between security, decentralization, and scalability in ways that traditional software engineering never had to consider.
This creates an environment where fundamental design choices can become complex philosophical debates: Should you optimize for trustlessness at the expense of performance? How decentralized does your solution really need to be? These questions have no universally correct answers, making blockchain engineering a field where innovation often comes from challenging our most basic assumptions about how software should work.
This guide was crafted by the Common Prefix team as a roadmap through the intricate world of blockchain engineering, designed to transform traditional software developers into architects of decentralized systems. Drawing from our own journey – as engineers with extensive experience building large-scale web2 systems who transitioned into web3 – we've distilled the essential knowledge and challenges we encountered along the way.
We've created a carefully structured learning path that builds expertise through practical experience and deep understanding. Each section of this guide includes clear learning objectives that define your milestones, curated external resources ranging from technical documentation to insightful articles, hands-on exercises that reinforce core concepts, and self-assessment checkpoints to verify your progress.
We've designed this guide to be what we needed when we first ventured into blockchain development: a practical roadmap that transforms complex concepts into actionable engineering knowledge.
💡 Info
This guide is a curated learning path. Each section contains:
- Learning objectives that clearly define what you should understand
- Carefully selected external resources (documentation, tutorials, articles)
- Hands-on exercises to reinforce your learning
- Self-assessment checkpoints to verify your understanding
Who This Guide is For
This guide is for:
- Seasoned web2 developers. You've already built large-scale web systems. You want to change gears into web3. You can skip the first chapter and go directly to Chapter 2.
- Junior programmers. You just graduated with a Computer Science degree, or taught yourself the equivalent of one. You've worked for a year or two either professionally or developing open source. You're looking to start a career directly in web3. Read from the first chapter to make sure you don't have any gaps, then move on to Chapter 2.
- Expert blockchain engineers. You've deployed real smart contracts that hold millions in total-value-locked. You've written some code for the execution or the consensus layer of a blockchain. You're looking to gain specialization. Read from Chapter 2 to make sure you don't have any gaps, then move on to Chapter 3.
Got feedback? Open a pull request.
Chapters
| Chapter | Description |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites | This section outlines fundamental computer science knowledge expected from professional software engineers. This section helps you identify and fill any knowledge gaps in areas like distributed systems, cryptography, and networking. |
| Foundations | This section contains essential blockchain-specific knowledge required for participating as an engineer in the blockchain ecosystem. You'll learn core concepts that all blockchain engineering shares, from consensus mechanisms to smart contract development. |
| Specialization | This section is meant to specialize engineers in one of the Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cosmos ecosystems. The goal is to gain deep expertise in your chosen ecosystem's architecture, development tools, and best practices. |
About us
Common Prefix is a blockchain research and development company. Blockchain technologies will empower a planetary-wide economic collaboration with efficient resource allocation in the near future, tracking capital, land, stock, government decisions, business and governmental contracts. In the path towards this mainstream adoption of a "world wide ledger", our mission is to solve the foundational scientific and engineering problems that stand in the way, in particular in the areas of interoperability, scalability, and usability. We are idealistic cryptographers who prove protocols secure using mathematics, and pragmatic engineers who implement protocols and take them to production, and we culminate the synergy between the two. A small team of 22 people, half scientists, half engineers, working with blockchain-first companies only, from L1 to L2 and DeFi protocols, among others Axelar, Espresso Systems, Mysten Labs, Celestia, Babylon, FlashBots, and Flare Networks among our customers, and multiple research grants from Ethereum Foundation.
Beyond working with external partners on a consulting or partnership basis, our engineering team is building core and foundational open source libraries and tooling to power the blockchain systems of tomorrow for the betterment of the community, focusing on Ethereum, Cosmos, and Bitcoin; and our research team is openly publishing papers in A* peer-reviewed scientific conferences and journals on all the foundational topics in the space, with the goal of getting performant protocols proven secure, cited, appreciated, implemented and deployed.
💡 Info
We are currently looking to scale the engineering team and we would love to get in touch with brilliant minds across the globe.
Reach out at careers@commonprefix.com with your CV.