XDRIP Academy · Course guide

Four years, one curriculum, no shortcuts.

Everything the Academy teaches, year by year: every course, every lesson, every lab and the gate you have to pass to leave each year. Read it the way you would read a university calendar. It is generated from the curriculum tree, so the structure printed here is the structure that is taught; where a lab or a track is not built yet, it says so.

6stages: orientation + 4 years
101courses
484lessons
262lesson hours, measured
4gates
9graduate tracks

Every course opens with a documented failure

A sourced incident, a measured result or a formal finding, never a hypothetical, taken apart to the decision that would have changed the outcome. The source is printed under each course. If we cannot source it, we do not teach from it.

You compute it by hand

Lessons marked by hand reduce to arithmetic you do yourself. The Academy never implies that any of this is profitable, and every objective is assessed or cut.

Gates, not grades

Each year ends in a practical. Every scored component has to pass on its own; a strong result in one does not carry a weak one. Pass, and you hold a dated credential with a renewal term. Hand-marked work is reviewed by a named assessor within 10 days of submission. One pass in 5 is marked a second time by a different assessor who cannot see the first marks, and the disagreement rate is published to the review team.

What is open today

Open means readable without an account: Orientation and Year One. Enrolled means a free account with a record, which is what the later years, the diagnostic, the labs and the gates all write to. 44 labs are defined: 44 open now, 0 marked coming. Enrollment is open in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union and EEA, Switzerland and Australia. Orientation and Year One are readable everywhere without an account. Enrollment is for adults, 18 and over.

Your money stays yours

The Academy never requests, receives, holds, routes or verifies learner funds. No assessed component requires a live position, and no assessment reads a wallet balance. Where a lesson describes live practice, it is optional enrichment, is not graded, and is not a condition of any credential. The Academy has no referral or affiliate relationship with any trading venue.

Pathways

Six ways through

The years are the full sequence. These are routes through the same courses for a learner who knows what they came for. Each states what it ends in, including where that is short of a gate.

Protect what I hold

67 lessons · 31.9 hrs

Every holder. Most people should take this and stop.

Custody, keys, signing, the threat model, third-party access, continuity and verification. Year One in full, because the Custody Practical examines all of it.

O100 F101 F102 F103 F104 F105 F106 F107 F108 F109 F110 F111

Ends in The Custody Practical, and the XDRIP Academy Certificate in Self-Custody (XA-C).

Decide whether to invest

104 lessons · 52 hrs

Investors who will not trade.

After Year One: how a market clears, what an asset is worth, where the data comes from, how to write an investment policy and how to measure your own returns. Chart reading is available in S203 and is not required.

O100 F101 F102 F103 F104 F105 F106 F107 F108 F109 F110 F111 S201 S202 S205 S206 S207 S208 S211

Ends in The Analyst Practical, and the XDRIP Academy Certificate in Digital Asset Analysis (XA-A). Since 2026-09-09 the gate scores the teardown, the investment policy and the returns paper; chart reading is taught in S203 and not required for the certificate.

Run payments and records

49 lessons · 23.5 hrs

Merchants, freelancers and finance staff.

What a chain is, why the rails differ, custody and signing, exchanges and on-ramps, and records you can reconcile. Ends at the practical business job rather than at a trading year.

O100 F101 F102 F103 F104 F105 F107 F108 F109

Ends in No gate yet. The payments practical lives in graduate track G6, which is a topic list today; the reviews propose bringing it forward as its own small gate.

Operate on chain

121 lessons · 61.5 hrs

Protocol users and operators.

After Year One and the Sophomore market-structure and data courses: contracts, permissions, bridges, swaps, liquidity, lending, yield and stablecoin operations, with the risk each one adds.

O100 F101 F102 F103 F104 F105 F106 F107 F108 F109 F110 F111 S201 S205 J301 J302 J303 J304 J305 J306 J310

Ends in The Operator Practical requires the Sophomore gate first and all of Junior, so this pathway is the shortest route to the material rather than a shortcut to XA-O.

Trade with leverage

264 lessons · 143.2 hrs

The Senior destination, unchanged.

Everything through Junior, then the Senior year: sizing from risk rather than ambition, derivatives, automation, and the base-rate acknowledgment before the Risk Practical.

O100 F101 F102 F103 F104 F105 F106 F107 F108 F109 F110 F111 S201 S202 S203 S205 S206 S207 S208 S209 S210 S211 S212 J301 J302 J303 J304 J305 J306 J307 J308 J310 J311 J312 J313 R401 R402 R403 R404 R405 R406 R407 R408 R409 R410 R411

Ends in The Risk Practical, and the XDRIP Academy Certificate in Risk-Managed Trading (XA-R).

Own what I make

74 lessons · 35.8 hrs

Creators and community operators.

Year One, then digital ownership and the creator economy: what a platform can take from you, what a DOT actually records, and a platform-exit plan.

O100 F101 F102 F103 F104 F105 F106 F107 F108 F109 F110 F111 J307

Ends in No gate yet. J307 sits in Junior today and inherits Junior's account requirement; the reviews propose an artifact gate, a platform-exit plan, which does not exist.

Before Year One

OrientationPlacement and Priming

4.6hours
2courses
9lessons
Openread without an account

Mission Find out what the learner already knows, what they are actually here for, how much they can afford to lose, and how badly calibrated their confidence is.

What you can do on the way out The learner has a per-domain competency map, a personalised path, a stated maximum sensible exposure, a baseline overconfidence score, and has read an honest account of the field's base rates.

No prerequisite.

O100 · 2.6 hours · 5 lessons

Placement and Priming

Opens with Knowing with Certainty, published 1977. Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein asked subjects hundreds of general knowledge questions and, for each answer, asked how confident they were in odds terms. Source: global-q.org

  1. O100-01 Diagnostic 28 min
  2. O100-02 Intent mapping 29 min
  3. O100-03 Risk capacity 40 min by hand
  4. O100-04 Calibration baseline 30 min
  5. O100-05 The honest brief 30 min
O100-L The calibration baseline Performance lab open now

20 questions each answered with a confidence percentage, producing the curve that is re-measured at every subsequent gate.

O101 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

After a Loss

Jurisdiction · as of 2026-09 Reporting and tax treatment in this course are United States federal, as they stood on the date beside this line: the FBI's IC3 and the IRS. Reporting routes and any deduction differ by country. The evidence file it tells you to keep is the same everywhere.

Opens with The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center 2024 annual report. 859,532 complaints and $16.6 billion in reported losses, a third more than the year before. Cryptocurrency was involved in $9.32 billion of it. Source: ledger.com

  1. O101-01 The first hour 30 min
  2. O101-02 What is and is not recoverable 29 min
  3. O101-03 Reporting, and the tax treatment 29 min
  4. O101-04 The second wave 30 min

Year One

FreshmanCustody, Safety and First Principles

29.3hours
11courses
62lessons
Openread without an account

Mission You will not lose money to theft, error, or misunderstanding. You can hold, send, receive, and recover value on your own.

What you can do on the way out The graduate can independently create and secure a multi-tier wallet architecture, recover from total device loss, read and correctly classify any signature request before approving it, identify the fifteen dominant attack patterns in live conditions, explain what a blockchain does and does not guarantee, execute a full on-ramp-to-self-custody flow with a known all-in cost, maintain records sufficient for tax reporting, enumerate and revoke every third party holding access to their funds, leave a continuity plan an heir can actually execute, and verify a person or a claim out of band when the face and the voice cannot be trusted.

No prerequisite.

F101 · 2.5 hours · 5 lessons

What a Blockchain Actually Is

Opens with The wrong-network send, which is a documented failure category rather than one named incident. A user withdraws a token on one chain to an address that exists on another, because the address string is identical on every EVM chain and nothing stops them. Source: coindesk.com

  1. F101-01 Ledgers, state, and what "the chain" is 30 min
  2. F101-02 Consensus in plain language 29 min
  3. F101-03 What decentralization buys and what it costs 31 min
  4. F101-04 Nodes, clients, and RPCs 31 min
  5. F101-05 Block explorers as a literacy skill 31 min
F101-L Trace three transactions Performance lab open now

Trace a simple transfer, a token swap and a failed transaction end to end on three supplied transaction pages: status, what moved, what each cost, who paid, and what the failed one still cost and why. Twenty questions, 18 to pass.

F102 · 2.6 hours · 5 lessons

Money, Trust, and Why Any of This Exists

Opens with TerraUSD, May 2022. UST was the third largest stablecoin at about $17.5B, and roughly 75 percent of it sat in Anchor, a protocol paying about 19.5 percent on deposits. Source: elischolar.library.yale.edu

  1. F102-01 What money does 31 min
  2. F102-02 The honest case for crypto, and against it 31 min
  3. F102-03 Bitcoin and Ethereum as design philosophies 29 min
  4. F102-04 Stablecoins 33 min
  5. F102-05 Where this is actually going 31 min
F102-L Price a remittance three ways Computational lab open now

Price a $200 remittance to three corridors across a bank wire, a remittance service and a stablecoin transfer, from a supplied rate card: full cost, time, and the off-ramp. The crypto rail does not always win, which is the point. Twenty questions, 18 to pass.

F103 · 2.5 hours · 5 lessons

Keys, Addresses, and What Custody Means

Opens with A 2025 survey of 1,000 US crypto holders found 35 percent had lost access to a wallet or account, and 31 percent of those never recovered the assets. The leading causes were a forgotten password (33 percent), a lost recovery phrase (21 percent) and lost access to two-factor authentication (20 percent). Source: theblock.co

  1. F103-01 The key chain 30 min
  2. F103-02 Seed phrases 31 min
  3. F103-03 Custodial vs self-custodial 24 min
  4. F103-04 Smart accounts and account abstraction 31 min
  5. F103-05 The new risk surface 31 min
F103-L Derivation path drill Performance lab open now

Take a throwaway seed generated for the sitting, derive the same address at the standard path in two wallets, then change the path and watch a different empty address appear. Four addresses to produce and one explanation of what happened. Never fund the seed.

F104 · 4.2 hours · 9 lessons

Wallet Architecture, Done Properly

Opens with April 2026. A fake Ledger Live application, submitted by a publisher with no connection to Ledger, passes Apple's review and is distributed through the official macOS App Store. Source: ledger.com

  1. F104-01 The wallet taxonomy 24 min
  2. F104-02 The three-tier architecture 30 min
  3. F104-03 Hardware wallet setup, end to end 24 min
  4. F104-04 Backup strategy 31 min
  5. F104-05 Recovery drills 24 min
  6. F104-06 Choosing your setup 25 min
  7. F104-07 Seed provenance: where the randomness came from 30 min
  8. F104-08 Air-gapped and connected signing 31 min
  9. F104-09 Signing offline: build, verify, broadcast 31 min
F104-L1 Build the three-tier architecture Performance lab open now

Stand up vault, daily and burner tiers in the sandbox, on BSC testnet, funded from the faucet: three wallets, a send between tiers in each direction, and the one-page specification from F104-06 filled in for what you built. Doing the same on a chain that carries value, with small amounts, is optional enrichment and is done on your own devices; the platform never asks for it.

F104-L2 The Wipe Drill Performance lab open now

Factory-reset the daily wallet and restore from backup. If you cannot restore it, you do not pass Freshman year. The highest-value fifteen minutes in the program.

F105 · 2.4 hours · 6 lessons

Transactions: What You Are Actually Signing

Opens with A single Permit2 signature. No gas, no on-chain transaction, one tap, authorizing an unlimited allowance across multiple tokens. Source: fxstreet.com

  1. F105-01 Anatomy of a transaction 26 min
  2. F105-02 The signature taxonomy 23 min
  3. F105-03 Blind signing and clear signing 20 min
  4. F105-04 Verification discipline 28 min
  5. F105-05 Approval hygiene 26 min
  6. F105-06 Incident response 21 min
F105-L The Signature Range Adversarial lab open now

20 signature requests in a sandbox, classified safe / suspicious / hostile with a statement of what each would do. Pass is 18/20 with zero false negatives on the hostile ones.

F106 · 3 hours · 6 lessons

The Threat Model

Opens with 10 January 2026. A holder is contacted by someone impersonating Trezor support and is talked into disclosing the twelve-word recovery phrase behind a hardware wallet. Source: chainalysis.com

  1. F106-01 The attack taxonomy 33 min
  2. F106-02 The psychology 31 min
  3. F106-03 Personal opsec 32 min
  4. F106-04 Don't be a target 31 min
  5. F106-05 Who gets targeted and how 30 min
  6. F106-06 The incident runbook 25 min
F106-L2 The Announced Gauntlet Adversarial lab open now

The same six to ten simulated attacks as the Gauntlet, but inside a 72-hour window the learner names in advance and consents to each time. Unannounced within the window, so the read is real; consented per window, so nobody has to accept fourteen days of ambush to earn the certificate. Same channels, same boundary, same pass standard: a 100 percent catch rate on critical-severity attempts across as many windows as it takes to deliver the set. Added 2026-09-10 so consent to the unannounced Gauntlet is freely given rather than conditioned on the credential.

F106-L The Gauntlet Adversarial lab open now

Over 14 days the platform sends six to ten realistic simulated attacks across email, in-app notification, a sandboxed dApp, a mock DM, and a synthetic voice note in a voice that belongs to nobody, delivered to the same inbox. Falling for one triggers an immediate teardown and adds attempts. Pass is a 100 percent catch rate on critical-severity attempts. Runs only with the learner's informed consent, given at enrollment in the lab and revocable; the voice channel can be declined on its own; attacks never use a personal phone number, a family member or any uninvolved third party; and the learner's own voice is never recorded, cloned or imitated.

F107 · 2.5 hours · 5 lessons

Exchanges, On-Ramps, and Off-Ramps

Opens with FTX, November 2022. Withdrawals were halted on 8 November and bankruptcy followed on 11 November. Source: rekt.news

  1. F107-01 CEX vs DEX 23 min
  2. F107-02 Order types as an execution skill 31 min
  3. F107-03 Account hardening 23 min
  4. F107-04 Counterparty risk 30 min
  5. F107-05 The true cost of a trade 40 min by hand
F107-L Round-trip cost Computational lab open now

Compute the all-in cost of buying, moving to self-custody, moving back and selling, from a supplied fee schedule, in both directions, as a percentage and as the break-even move. Learners routinely find 3 to 8 percent; doing it for real with $20 is enrichment the site does not grade.

F108 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

Records, Taxes, and Operating Like an Adult

Jurisdiction · as of 2026-09 United States federal tax rules only, and only as they stood on the date beside this line: the 1099-DA regime is mid-transition, with gross proceeds reporting from 2025 transactions and basis reporting from 2026, and the Revenue Procedure 2024-28 allocation safe harbor has already changed what correct looks like once. Treatment differs by country, including whether a swap between tokens is a disposal at all. Take the questions this course teaches you to ask to somebody qualified where you live.

Opens with A US user receives a Form 1099-DA showing $180,000 in proceeds and no cost basis, because the assets were transferred in from self-custody and the broker never saw what was paid for them. On paper they owe tax on the entire amount. Source: irs.gov

  1. F108-01 The taxable events map 30 min
  2. F108-02 Basis and the 2026 regime 40 min by hand
  3. F108-03 Form 1099-DA in practice 24 min
  4. F108-04 Building the record habit 25 min
F108-L Reconcile a supplied wallet Computational lab open now

A supplied one-year wallet export, as a tax tool classified it, with three rows the tool got wrong, because it always does. Reconcile it by hand: lot cost basis, first-in-first-out gains, the transfer booked as a sale, the airdrop given no basis, the gas the tool dropped, and the corrected totals. Twenty questions, timed, 18 of 20 to pass. Running the same reconciliation on your own export is the point of the course and is done on your own machine; the platform never sees it.

F109 · 2.2 hours · 5 lessons

Third-Party Access and Delegated Control

Opens with 3Commas, 2022. Around 100,000 exchange API keys belonging to users of a trading-bot service were leaked, with a sample published in December and the rest threatened. Source: halborn.com

  1. F109-01 The delegation map 24 min
  2. F109-02 API keys 30 min
  3. F109-03 Session-based access 24 min
  4. F109-04 Smart-account delegation 30 min
  5. F109-05 The delegation policy 23 min
F109-L The Access Audit Reviewed artifact open now

Produce a complete inventory of every third party with any form of access to any account or wallet the learner controls. Revoke everything not actively in use. Evidence before and after. Learners routinely find approvals from protocols that no longer exist.

F110 · 2.4 hours · 6 lessons

Inheritance and Continuity

Opens with Matthew Mellon died in April 2018 holding a reported half a billion dollars of XRP. The keys were held in cold storage registered under other people's names in multiple locations, and were never located. Source: thehustle.co

  1. F110-01 Why most crypto dies with its owner 20 min
  2. F110-02 Estate planning meets private keys 22 min
  3. F110-03 Secret splitting and Shamir, without the math 37 min by hand
  4. F110-04 Dead-man switches that actually work 23 min
  5. F110-05 What to tell your heirs, and what not to 21 min
  6. F110-06 Writing the continuity plan 21 min
F110-L1 The Continuity Plan Reviewed artifact open now

A written plan a non-technical heir could execute: what exists, where it is, what to do first, what never to do, and who to call. Rubric-scored. This is the gate component, because it is enforceable for every learner regardless of circumstance.

F110-L2 The Continuity Drill Performance lab open now

A named heir recovers a test wallet using only the written plan, with the learner absent and unable to help. The sibling of the Wipe Drill: a plan nobody has executed is not a plan. Strongly recommended, not gated, because it requires a second consenting person and many learners do not yet have one.

F111 · 3 hours · 6 lessons

AI-Era Threats and Verification

Opens with Hong Kong, reported February 2024. A finance worker at the engineering firm Arup receives a phishing email impersonating the UK-based CFO and is suspicious of it, which is the correct instinct. Source: fbi.gov

  1. F111-01 How scammers use AI now 27 min
  2. F111-02 Deepfakes and voice clones 30 min
  3. F111-03 Fake support, fake profiles, fake KOLs 30 min
  4. F111-04 Verifying anything in the AI era 30 min
  5. F111-05 Prompt injection and the agents that act for you 33 min
  6. F111-06 Using AI tools safely as a creator or business 29 min
F111-L The Verification Protocol Reviewed artifact open now

Establish an out-of-band verification protocol with one real person who could plausibly be impersonated to you, then test it. Shared secret, callback channel, and a written rule that no legitimate process is ever destroyed by a five-minute delay.

The gate

The Custody Practical

6 pass-required components plus 1 calibration measurement, shown to you and never failed. Every pass-required component has to pass on its own; there is no averaging across them.

ComponentPass standardRequirement
The Wipe DrillPerformance lab Verified wallet restoration from backup. Pass required
The Signature RangeAdversarial lab 18/20, zero false negatives on hostile requests. Pass required
The GauntletAdversarial lab · F106-L or F106-L2 100 percent catch rate on critical-severity simulated attacks. Pass required
Written threat examWritten exam 90 percent, randomized from a pool of 400+ items, with scenario questions requiring an explained answer rather than multiple choice. Pass required
The Access AuditReviewed artifact Complete third-party access inventory produced and everything unused revoked, with before and after evidence. Pass required
The Continuity PlanReviewed artifact A written plan a non-technical heir could execute, rubric-scored. The Continuity Drill (F110-L2) is strongly recommended but not required, because it needs a second consenting person. Pass required
Calibration re-testCalibration Measured against the Orientation baseline and shown to the learner. Not pass/fail. Measured, shown to you

On passing

XA-C XDRIP Academy Certificate in Self-Custody

Valid for 12 months. Renewal: Current Threat Update module plus a re-run of the Gauntlet with a fresh attack set.

  • No retakes within 72 hours. The cooling period is deliberate and prevents cram-and-forget.
  • The Gauntlet (F106-L) was built on 2026-09-11 inside the consent architecture recorded here on 2026-09-09: explicit informed consent at enrollment in the lab, revocable at any time and with an out-of-band stop code; an opt-out for the voice channel; a written scope boundary (never a personal phone number, never a family member, never an uninvolved third party). DECIDED 2026-09-14: the voice channel uses a synthetic voice that belongs to nobody, generated once from a transcript, and the learner's own voice is never recorded or cloned; the biometric instrument and its retention term were retired with the clone. A lab that sends unannounced attacks to people who may already have been victims is defensible only with those rails.
  • The gate tests every course that produces a performance artifact. F101, F102, F103, F107, F108 and F111 are examined through the written threat exam rather than a dedicated component; F111 is additionally tested live, because the Gauntlet now runs a synthetic-media channel.

Year Two

SophomoreMarkets, Assets and Valuation

35.7hours
11courses
66lessons
Enrolledneeds a free account

Mission Understand what you are actually buying, how it gets priced, and how to evaluate it, before you ever take a leveraged position.

What you can do on the way out The graduate can perform a complete teardown of any token, read a chart to identify structure without hindsight bias, explain what each common indicator measures and where it fails, source and interpret on-chain data independently, articulate a written investment policy with pre-committed rules, and demonstrate measurably improved calibration.

Requires Freshman.

S201 · 2.8 hours · 5 lessons

Market Structure and Price Formation

Opens with Mango Markets, 11 October 2022. Roughly $4M was used to buy MNGO across three venues, moving the oracle-reported price by around 2,300 percent. Source: coindesk.com

  1. S201-01 Order books 41 min by hand
  2. S201-02 Who is on the other side 31 min
  3. S201-03 AMMs vs order books 31 min
  4. S201-04 Price across venues 31 min
  5. S201-05 24/7 markets 32 min
S201-L Market vs laddered limit Computational lab open now

Walk the same notional through a deep book and a thin one as a market order and as a laddered limit, record the four realized prices and the spread between them, and reprice the market order on a crisis book with a third of the depth.

S202 · 3.4 hours · 6 lessons

Token Analysis and Tokenomics

Opens with Movement Labs and the MOVE token. MOVE debuted on 9 December 2024 behind a company later valued at around $3B. Source: ankr.com

  1. S202-01 Supply mechanics 40 min by hand
  2. S202-02 Reading a vesting schedule 41 min by hand
  3. S202-03 Distribution and concentration 31 min
  4. S202-04 Value accrual 31 min
  5. S202-05 The sector map 31 min
  6. S202-06 Red flags and honest memecoin treatment 32 min
S202-L Asset teardown Reviewed artifact open now

Full written teardown of a live asset: supply, distribution, unlocks, value accrual, contract permissions, liquidity depth, and a stated bull and bear case with the specific facts that would falsify each.

S203 · 6.6 hours · 12 lessons

Chart Literacy and Evidence

Opens with The head-and-shoulders pattern, tested. Carol Osler's Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff report identified traders acting on head-and-shoulders patterns in US equities as noise traders: volume was exceptionally high when they were active, their trading was unprofitable, and the price effects of their activity disappeared within about two weeks. Source: coindesk.com

  1. S203-01 The primitives 31 min
  2. S203-02 Market structure 31 min
  3. S203-03 Support, resistance, and supply/demand 31 min
  4. S203-04 The three states 31 min
  5. S203-05 Multi-timeframe context 31 min
  6. S203-06 The honesty module 32 min
  7. S203-07 Trendlines and channels 30 min
  8. S203-08 Moving averages 40 min by hand
  9. S203-09 Oscillators 41 min by hand
  10. S203-10 Volatility and volume tools 40 min by hand
  11. S203-11 Fibonacci, honestly 29 min
  12. S203-12 Indicator hygiene 31 min
S203-L Bar Replay Performance lab open now

Twenty randomized historical sequences with the right side hidden. Mark structure, identify the state, and commit to a directional read with a confidence percentage before revealing. Scored on calibration, not accuracy.

S203-L2 Three contradictory conclusions Reviewed artifact open now

One chart, three indicator configurations, three defensible and mutually contradictory conclusions. Write all three, state which you would act on, and state what would prove you wrong.

S205 · 2.5 hours · 5 lessons

On-Chain and Fundamental Data

Opens with Three Arrows Capital, June 2022. As the fund failed to meet margin calls, its positions were visible on a public ledger and were being read in real time by anonymous analysts. Source: halborn.com

  1. S205-01 The explorer as an analyst tool 30 min
  2. S205-02 The data stack 30 min
  3. S205-03 Metrics that carry signal 30 min
  4. S205-04 Following the money 31 min
  5. S205-05 Building a thesis from data 30 min
S205-L Protocol dashboard and thesis Reviewed artifact open now

Build a one-page data dashboard for a single protocol and write a 500-word thesis with three named metrics that would prove it wrong.

S206 · 2.5 hours · 5 lessons

Macro, Cycles, and Narrative

Opens with The stock-to-flow model. A widely followed quantitative model relating bitcoin's price to the ratio of existing supply to new issuance produced dated, specific predictions: a floor of about $98,000 for November 2021 and about $135,000 for December 2021. Source: imf.org

  1. S206-01 Macro drivers 31 min
  2. S206-02 Flows and structure 30 min
  3. S206-03 Cycles, contested 30 min
  4. S206-04 Narrative mechanics 31 min
  5. S206-05 Information literacy 30 min
S206-L Narrative post-mortem Reviewed artifact open now

Post-mortem of one completed 2024 to 2026 narrative cycle. When did it become consensus, who was early, who was paid, and where was the exhaustion signal?

S207 · 3.2 hours · 6 lessons

Investing Frameworks (Unleveraged)

Opens with The behavior gap, measured annually for three decades. DALBAR's Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior measures what fund investors actually earn, after the decisions they make along the way, against the return of the funds themselves. Source: imf.org

  1. S207-01 Portfolio construction 30 min
  2. S207-02 The drawdown math 40 min by hand
  3. S207-03 Entry and exit frameworks 31 min
  4. S207-04 Time horizon honesty 30 min
  5. S207-05 Yield without leverage 31 min
  6. S207-06 Writing the Investment Policy Statement 30 min
S207-L The Investment Policy Statement Reviewed artifact open now

Produce a signed, dated IPS. Stored in the platform and surfaced back to the learner every time they later take a simulated action that violates it.

S208 · 2.6 hours · 5 lessons

Behavioral Finance and the Operator

Opens with Barber and Odean, Journal of Finance, 2000. Examining 66,465 households holding accounts at a large discount broker between 1991 and 1996, the study found the average household turned over 75 percent of its portfolio annually and earned 16.4 percent, against a market return of 17.9 percent. Source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com

  1. S208-01 The bias catalog, applied 31 min
  2. S208-02 Overconfidence, measured 31 min
  3. S208-03 Social contagion and product design 30 min
  4. S208-04 When this stops being investing 30 min
  5. S208-05 Building a personal operating system 31 min
S208-L Calibration re-test and decision journal Reviewed artifact open now

Calibration re-test with delta reporting against baseline, plus a written decision-journal entry on a real past decision separating process from luck.

S209 · 3.7 hours · 7 lessons

The Centralized Exchange in Depth

Opens with Binance Unified Accounts, 10 October 2025. Assets accepted as portfolio-margin collateral repriced violently against the exchange's own internal order book rather than against external oracles: USDe printed as low as about $0.65, wrapped Beacon ETH reportedly reached around $0.20 on the dollar and Binance Staked SOL around $0.13, while the same assets held near par elsewhere. Source: cftc.gov

  1. S209-01 How an exchange actually works 29 min
  2. S209-02 The full order type inventory 31 min
  3. S209-03 Account architecture 30 min
  4. S209-04 The product menu as a risk map 30 min
  5. S209-05 Fees, tiers, and the real cost of activity 40 min by hand
  6. S209-06 Counterparty risk, seriously 30 min
  7. S209-07 Operating on a CEX professionally 30 min
S209-L Exchange dependency diagram Reviewed artifact open now

Map an exchange's full product menu into a dependency diagram: which products share collateral, which can trigger liquidation in which others, and what a 60 percent drop in the most illiquid holding does to the account.

S210 · 3 hours · 6 lessons

Automation Literacy: What Bots Actually Do

Opens with 10 October 2025, read as an automation event. More than $19B of leveraged positions were forcibly closed across more than 1.6 million traders, with roughly 85 to 90 percent of liquidated positions reported to be longs, and market makers on at least one venue reported infrastructure failures that left some locked out and unable to place risk-reducing orders. Source: cointelegraph.com

  1. S210-01 The bot taxonomy 30 min
  2. S210-02 The unifying insight 31 min
  3. S210-03 Reading a bot's marketing 29 min
  4. S210-04 AI bots specifically 30 min
  5. S210-05 The security surface 30 min
  6. S210-06 When automation is genuinely the right tool 31 min
S210-L Honest version of a marketing page Reviewed artifact open now

Take three supplied bot performance pages. Identify sample period, market regime, whether fees are included, configuration count and maximum drawdown (usually absent; note the absence as a finding). Write the honest version of each page.

S211 · 3.1 hours · 5 lessons

Portfolio Analytics and Performance Measurement

Opens with SPIVA U.S. Scorecard, year-end 2024. Source: aeaweb.org

  1. S211-01 Measuring return correctly 40 min by hand
  2. S211-02 Benchmarking honestly 40 min by hand
  3. S211-03 Risk-adjusted measures 42 min by hand
  4. S211-04 Attribution 33 min
  5. S211-05 Building the reporting stack 33 min
S211-L Did the activity add value? Computational lab open now

A supplied twelve-month portfolio ledger with dated deposits and withdrawals, a BTC price series and a cash rate. Compute the time-weighted and money-weighted returns by hand, benchmark against BTC and against cash, and say in dollars and in points whether the activity added or destroyed value. Twenty questions, timed, 18 of 20 to pass. Then run the same arithmetic on your own records if you have them, on your own machine: that is the exercise that changes behavior, and the platform never sees it.

S212 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

TradFi Access Rails: ETFs, ETPs, and Treasuries

Opens with XIV, 5 February 2018. Credit Suisse announced the event acceleration of its VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short Term ETNs, because the intraday indicative value on 5 February was equal to or less than twenty percent of the prior day's closing indicative value, which was $108.3681. Source: coindesk.com

  1. S212-01 Spot ETFs and ETPs 31 min
  2. S212-02 Futures-based and leveraged products 43 min by hand
  3. S212-03 Digital asset treasury companies 33 min
  4. S212-04 Choosing a wrapper 31 min

The gate

The Analyst Practical

3 pass-required components plus 1 calibration measurement, shown to you and never failed. Every pass-required component has to pass on its own; there is no averaging across them.

ComponentPass standardRequirement
Written asset teardownReviewed artifact Complete S202-standard analysis of an assigned token, rubric-scored. Pass required
IPS submissionReviewed artifact Completeness and internal consistency checked. Pass required
Returns measurementComputational lab 18 of 20, timed, on a supplied twelve-month ledger: time-weighted and money-weighted return, the benchmarks, and whether the activity added value, hand-computed. Pass required
Calibration deltaCalibration Must show measured movement toward calibration, or the learner is routed to a remediation module rather than blocked. Measured, shown to you

On passing

XA-A XDRIP Academy Certificate in Digital Asset Analysis

Valid for 24 months. Renewal: Current Market Structure Update modules.

  • DECIDED 2026-09-09: XA-A certifies analysis, policy and measurement. Until this date two of the four scored components were chart reading, the bar replay (S203-L) and the indicator interrogation (S203-L2), and S211's returns measurement had no component at all. Three independent reviews found that an investor who never intends to read a chart should be able to hold the certificate, and that the one exercise the year says changes behavior was not counted. The two chart labs stay in S203 and stay sittable as teaching labs; the bar replay's calibration score is still reported to the learner on the lab and on the account, and is not part of the gate.

Year Three

JuniorOn-Chain Operator

38.6hours
12courses
69lessons
Enrolledneeds a free account

Mission Operate across chains and protocols with a correct model of every risk you are absorbing, including the ones nobody discloses.

What you can do on the way out The graduate can bridge assets with an understood risk profile, execute swaps with awareness of MEV and routing, compute impermanent loss and identify LP as a short-volatility position, manage a collateralized borrow through a stress scenario, decompose any advertised yield into its actual sources and risks, assess a smart contract's permission surface without reading Solidity, and evaluate an airdrop campaign's true expected value after gas, time, and tax.

Requires Sophomore.

J301 · 2.7 hours · 5 lessons

Chains, Layer 2s, and Bridges

Opens with The Nomad bridge, 1 August 2022. A routine upgrade to the implementation behind one of Nomad's proxy contracts initialized the trusted root to 0x00, which is also the value stored for an untrusted root, so every message submitted to the bridge was treated as already proven. Source: slowmist.medium.com

  1. J301-01 The scaling landscape 31 min
  2. J301-02 Alt-L1s 32 min
  3. J301-03 Bridge architectures 31 min
  4. J301-04 Bridge risk, specifically 33 min
  5. J301-05 When it goes wrong 34 min
J301-L Three bridges, three mechanisms Performance lab open now

Move value across three ecosystems via three different mechanisms. Log cost, time, number of trust assumptions, and worst-case failure for each. Produce a comparison matrix.

J302 · 6.7 hours · 12 lessons

Swap Execution: AMMs, MEV, and DEX Architectures

Opens with Uniswap v3, 12 March 2025. A trader submitted a swap of 220,764 USDC for USDT and received about $5,271, a loss of roughly 98 percent. Source: coindesk.com

  1. J302-01 Constant product math 41 min by hand
  2. J302-02 Price impact and slippage 42 min by hand
  3. J302-03 The transaction lifecycle 32 min
  4. J302-04 MEV 33 min
  5. J302-05 Execution discipline on-chain 31 min
  6. J302-06 The four architectures 32 min
  7. J302-07 AMM generations, properly 32 min
  8. J302-08 On-chain order books and app-chains 31 min
  9. J302-09 Aggregators and routing 31 min
  10. J302-10 Intents and solvers 32 min
  11. J302-11 Perp DEXs 32 min
  12. J302-12 Launch venues and bonding curves 33 min
J302-L The Execution Bake-Off Computational lab open now

One swap routed five ways: through an AMM directly, an aggregator, a protected RPC, an intent-based DEX and an on-chain order book. Attribute the cost of each from quoted and realized price, fee and gas, derive the AMM's impact from its reserves, price the tolerance, and compute the sandwich threshold.

J303 · 3 hours · 5 lessons

Liquidity Provision and Impermanent Loss

Opens with Topaze Blue and Bancor, November 2021. A study of 17 Uniswap v3 pools representing about 43 percent of the protocol's total value locked found that liquidity providers had earned $199.3M in fees since inception and suffered $260.1M in impermanent loss over the same period, so in aggregate they would have been better off by $60.8M by simply holding their tokens. Source: blog.kaiko.com

  1. J303-01 What providing liquidity actually is 30 min
  2. J303-02 Impermanent loss, derived 42 min by hand
  3. J303-03 The breakeven calculation 42 min by hand
  4. J303-04 Concentrated liquidity 33 min
  5. J303-05 Pool selection 32 min
J303-L Model it, then live it Computational lab open now

Build an LP model and project a position across three price paths against holding; the assessed half is the impermanent loss and liquidation mathematics paper, twenty timed questions, 18 of 20 to pass. Running the same position for two weeks and reconciling the model against reality is optional enrichment, on BSC testnet from the sandbox or, if you choose, with small real capital on your own devices; the platform never asks for it and never grades it.

J304 · 2.8 hours · 5 lessons

Lending, Borrowing, and Collateralized Leverage

Opens with MakerDAO, 12 and 13 March 2020. Ether fell about 50 percent in twenty-four hours and the protocol was swamped with liquidations while network congestion drove gas prices up. Source: decrypt.co

  1. J304-01 Overcollateralized lending 30 min
  2. J304-02 The liquidation event 41 min by hand
  3. J304-03 Interest rate mechanics 32 min
  4. J304-04 Looping and recursive strategies 32 min
  5. J304-05 Systemic risk 32 min
J304-L The Liquidation Drill Performance lab open now

Open a collateralized borrow on paper: compute the health factor and the liquidation price by hand before the path starts, then follow a ten-day price path to the liquidation and account for it in full: what was repaid, what was taken with the bonus, what is left, and the band where nobody comes.

J305 · 2.8 hours · 5 lessons

Staking, Restaking, and Yield Architecture

Opens with Renzo, 24 April 2024. The liquid restaking token ezETH, which had traded above $3,000, fell to about $688 on Uniswap within an hour following the protocol's airdrop and tokenomics announcement and the close of its points farming window. Source: jenner.com

  1. J305-01 The yield taxonomy 30 min
  2. J305-02 Native staking and LSTs 32 min
  3. J305-03 Restaking and LRTs 32 min
  4. J305-04 Points programs 32 min
  5. J305-05 The risk-stacking problem 42 min by hand
J305-L Decompose three yields Computational lab open now

Decompose three supplied advertised yields into what is paid out of revenue, what is an emission, and what is points; compound each stack's survival; adjust each yield for the probability of losing the principal; rank them and see how far the ranking moves from the advertised one.

J306 · 2.6 hours · 5 lessons

Smart Contract Risk for Non-Developers

Opens with Multichain, July 2023. The cross-chain router was presented as a decentralized system secured by a network of multi-party computation nodes. Source: thecoinrepublic.com

  1. J306-01 Reading a contract without reading code 31 min
  2. J306-02 Upgradeability and admin keys 32 min
  3. J306-03 Audits 32 min
  4. J306-04 The rug taxonomy 32 min
  5. J306-05 A risk rubric 31 min
J306-L Rate three live protocols Reviewed artifact open now

Risk-rate three live protocols with the rubric, including at least one the learner currently uses. Written justification for each score.

J307 · 3.9 hours · 7 lessons

Digital Ownership and the Creator Economy

Opens with The royalty collapse, 2022 to 2024. Creator royalties were never enforced by the token standard; they were paid because marketplaces chose to collect and forward them. Source: cryptoglobe.com

  1. J307-01 The honest NFT retrospective 31 min
  2. J307-02 DOT, not NFT, and why the distinction is load bearing 30 min
  3. J307-03 Where non-fungibility actually works now 32 min
  4. J307-04 How on-chain royalties really work 31 min
  5. J307-05 Self-sovereign distribution, end to end 32 min
  6. J307-06 Platform risk for creators, ranked 32 min
  7. J307-07 Issuance, pricing, and distribution 43 min by hand
J307-L Rank your own platform risk Reviewed artifact open now

For a real creator or business, enumerate every platform that stands between the work and the audience or the revenue. Rank each by what it can unilaterally take away, how much notice you would get, and what the exit costs. Then state which single dependency, if removed tomorrow, ends the business.

J308 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Governance, DAOs, and Airdrop Economics

Opens with Beanstalk Farms, 17 April 2022. An attacker took roughly $1B of flash loans from Aave, converted the proceeds into the protocol's governance instrument, and thereby held more than 67 percent of voting power. Source: coindesk.com

  1. J308-01 Governance mechanics 30 min
  2. J308-02 Governance as an attack surface 31 min
  3. J308-03 Airdrop farming, honestly 42 min by hand
  4. J308-04 Participating well 31 min
J308-L Model a live farming campaign Computational lab open now

Model a campaign end to end from a supplied card: gross, capital opportunity cost, gas, time at a real hourly rate, ordinary income tax at receipt, the net, the effective hourly rate, and the hit rate a portfolio of campaigns needs to break even. Present the number. Decide.

J310 · 3.7 hours · 7 lessons

Real World Assets: Tokenized Finance

Opens with USDC and Silicon Valley Bank, 10 to 13 March 2023. Silicon Valley Bank entered federal receivership on 10 March after more than $40B of withdrawals in a single day. Source: cftc.gov

  1. J310-01 What tokenization actually is 31 min
  2. J310-02 The three stacks 31 min
  3. J310-03 The categories, with current shape 31 min
  4. J310-04 Legal structures, the actual skill 32 min
  5. J310-05 Access, transfer, and redemption mechanics 32 min
  6. J310-06 RWAs inside DeFi, collateral mobility 32 min
  7. J310-07 The RWA due diligence checklist 31 min
J310-L Trace a tokenized product to the asset Reviewed artifact open now

Trace one live tokenized product from the on-chain token to the underlying asset. Name every entity, what each is legally obligated to do, what happens to your claim if each one fails, and how long redemption actually takes. Then compare to holding the underlying directly.

J311 · 2.8 hours · 5 lessons

Privacy, Surveillance, and Compliance Exposure

Opens with The Tornado Cash dusting, 8 to 11 August 2022. OFAC added Tornado Cash to the Specially Designated Nationals list on 8 August 2022, which made it unlawful for US persons to transact with it. Source: trmlabs.com

  1. J311-01 You are being watched, and so is everyone 33 min
  2. J311-02 Your own privacy surface 33 min
  3. J311-03 Privacy tooling and its legal reality 34 min
  4. J311-04 Compliance exposure as a user 33 min
  5. J311-05 Defensive hygiene 33 min

J312 · 2.4 hours · 4 lessons

Insurance, Hedging, and On-Chain Risk Transfer

Opens with Nexus Mutual and FTX Custody Cover, November 2022 to February 2023. When FTX halted withdrawals in November 2022 there were 35 active FTX Custody Covers, totaling 1,611 ETH and 6,853,539 DAI, worth roughly $8.79M and representing 4.33 percent of the mutual's capital pool. Source: fdic.gov

  1. J312-01 What can and cannot be insured 33 min
  2. J312-02 Cover protocols 32 min
  3. J312-03 Self-insurance and structural hedges 33 min
  4. J312-04 Building a coverage decision 43 min by hand

J313 · 3 hours · 5 lessons

Mining, Validating, and Running Infrastructure

Opens with Core Scientific, 21 December 2022. One of the largest listed bitcoin miners filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas, listing about $1.33B of liabilities. Source: blog.hashrateindex.com

  1. J313-01 Proof of Work economics 42 min by hand
  2. J313-02 Validating 33 min
  3. J313-03 Delegation and staking services 32 min
  4. J313-04 Node operation as a user 32 min
  5. J313-05 DePIN and infrastructure participation 43 min by hand

The gate

The Operator Practical

4 pass-required components plus 1 calibration measurement, shown to you and never failed. Every pass-required component has to pass on its own; there is no averaging across them.

Before you can be examined

  • Sophomore gate passed
  • Current, unexpired Freshman custody certificate (XA-C)
ComponentPass standardRequirement
Execution portfolioPerformance lab A documented set of real on-chain actions: a bridge, a swap with routing comparison, an LP position opened and closed, a collateralized borrow managed through a stress event, and a yield position entered and exited. Pass required
Risk memo per actionReviewed artifact Before each action, a written pre-mortem: what am I exposed to, what is the worst case, what is my exit trigger. Pass required
Protocol risk assessmentReviewed artifact Rubric-scored evaluation of an assigned protocol. Pass required
The IL and liquidation math examComputational lab Hand-computed, no calculator tools. Pass required
Calibration re-testCalibration Measured against the running baseline. Measured, shown to you

On passing

XA-O XDRIP Academy Certificate in On-Chain Operations

Valid for 24 months. Renewal: Current Market Structure Update modules.

  • The execution portfolio spans five courses. Only the bridge lab is linked here as its source; the remaining four actions need their own lab ids if the gate is to be machine-checkable.

Year Four

SeniorDerivatives, Leverage and Risk Management

37hours
11courses
62lessons
Enrolledneeds a free account

Mission If you are going to use leverage, you will use it as a professional does: sized from risk, not from ambition, with the math done before the position opens.

What you can do on the way out The graduate can compute a liquidation price by hand for any position including fees and funding, size a position from stop distance and risk budget rather than from a leverage multiplier, articulate the expectancy and drawdown profile of their own system, execute and manage derivative positions with appropriate order types, validate or reject a strategy with statistical honesty, use options for hedging, and operate a documented process with enforced circuit breakers.

Requires Junior.

R401 · 2.9 hours · 5 lessons

Derivatives Foundations

Opens with 10 October 2025. A US announcement of forthcoming 100 percent tariffs on Chinese goods triggered the largest single-day deleveraging recorded in this market. Source: cftc.gov

  1. R401-01 The instrument set 33 min
  2. R401-02 Position mechanics 32 min
  3. R401-03 The three prices 32 min
  4. R401-04 The funding rate 42 min by hand
  5. R401-05 Basis, carry, and structure 33 min

R402 · 3.8 hours · 6 lessons

Margin and Liquidation Mathematics

Opens with BitMEX, 12 to 13 March 2020. Bitcoin fell from roughly $7,900 to about $3,600 in the 24 hours from 12 March, and the largest perpetual venue of the period ran a liquidation cascade in which each forced sale pushed the price down and triggered the next. Source: bdo.co.uk

  1. R402-01 Margin mechanics 42 min by hand
  2. R402-02 Deriving the liquidation price 43 min by hand
  3. R402-03 The reframe: leverage is not risk 42 min by hand
  4. R402-04 Beyond liquidation 32 min
  5. R402-05 Cascade dynamics 33 min
  6. R402-06 Venue differences 33 min
R402-L1 Build your own liquidation calculator Computational lab open now

Build a liquidation calculator from scratch, in a spreadsheet or in code, that handles both directions, cross and isolated margin, fees and accrued funding. Then validate it: twenty positions against a supplied venue's parameters, 18 of 20 exact, is the validation set.

R402-L2 Twenty hand-computed scenarios Computational lab open now

Twenty hand-computed liquidation scenarios under time pressure. Pass is 18/20 exact.

R403 · 3.9 hours · 6 lessons

Risk Management as the Actual Product

Opens with Long-Term Capital Management, September 1998. The fund was built around convergence trades in fixed income, run by a partnership that included two Nobel laureates in economics and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, using risk models regarded at the time as the most sophisticated in the industry. Source: britannica.com

  1. R403-01 Risk per trade 42 min by hand
  2. R403-02 The position sizing formula 42 min by hand
  3. R403-03 Drawdown, streaks, and ruin 42 min by hand
  4. R403-04 Expectancy and R-multiples 43 min by hand
  5. R403-05 Portfolio-level risk 33 min
  6. R403-06 Circuit breakers 33 min
R403-L Monte Carlo your own parameters Computational lab open now

10,000 runs on the learner's own stated parameters. Output: expected drawdown distribution, ruin probability, and the leverage level at which the system fails regardless of edge.

R404 · 3.1 hours · 5 lessons

Execution and Trade Craft

Opens with The Flash Crash, 6 May 2010. At 2:32pm Eastern, against a backdrop the joint SEC and CFTC report described as unusually high volatility and thinning liquidity, a large asset manager began selling 75,000 E-mini S&P 500 contracts, about $4.1B of notional, as a hedge against an existing equity position. Source: frbsf.org

  1. R404-01 Entry models 33 min
  2. R404-02 Stop placement 43 min by hand
  3. R404-03 Exits 33 min
  4. R404-04 Order types on derivative venues 33 min
  5. R404-05 True cost of a strategy 42 min by hand

R405 · 2.9 hours · 5 lessons

Strategy Development and Validation

Opens with The quant quake, 6 to 9 August 2007. Over four days, quantitatively managed equity market-neutral and statistical arbitrage funds recorded losses without precedent in their own histories, in a week when the broad equity market itself moved very little. Source: blog.revolutionanalytics.com

  1. R405-01 The pipeline 33 min
  2. R405-02 Writing rules that are actually testable 33 min
  3. R405-03 The seven sins of backtesting 33 min
  4. R405-04 Statistical honesty 43 min by hand
  5. R405-05 The journal as a data pipeline 34 min
R405-L Kill Your Darling Reviewed artifact open now

Two parts. First, one of your own strategies: specify it to R405-02's reproduction test, write the acceptance rule and the rejection rule before you run anything, report every configuration tried, include costs, run the test, and defend the verdict the evidence supports, accept, reject or inconclusive. A rejection is the usual outcome and is not the requirement. Second, a supplied strategy with a reported backtest that is known to be overfit: name the errors that account for its result and show, with R405-03's and R405-04's arithmetic, why the reported figure is not evidence. That half is where rejecting is the skill.

R406 · 3.1 hours · 5 lessons

Options and Structured Positions

Opens with GameStop, January 2021. Buying concentrated in short-dated out-of-the-money call options rather than in the shares. Source: federalreserve.gov

  1. R406-01 Options fundamentals 32 min
  2. R406-02 The Greeks in plain language 42 min by hand
  3. R406-03 Implied volatility 42 min by hand
  4. R406-04 Practical structures, hedging first 33 min
  5. R406-05 What not to do, and what is on-chain 34 min

R407 · 2.9 hours · 5 lessons

Advanced Market Mechanics

Opens with Navinder Singh Sarao, 2009 to 2016. Trading E-mini S&P 500 futures from his parents' house near Heathrow, Sarao ran what the CFTC called a dynamic layering program, placing large sell orders at multiple price levels that he modified as the market approached them and canceled before they could execute. Source: sec.gov

  1. R407-01 Order flow 32 min
  2. R407-02 The positioning triad 32 min
  3. R407-03 Liquidity and stop clusters 32 min
  4. R407-04 Delta-neutral and carry strategies 43 min by hand
  5. R407-05 Market manipulation literacy 34 min

R408 · 3.2 hours · 6 lessons

The Professional Operating System

Opens with Day Trading for a Living, published 2020. Fernando Chague, Rodrigo De-Losso and Bruno Giovannetti obtained Brazilian securities regulator records covering 19,646 individuals who began day trading mini-Ibovespa index futures between 2013 and 2015, and followed them through 2017. Source: nejm.org

  1. R408-01 The trading plan document 32 min
  2. R408-02 Routines 32 min
  3. R408-03 Tilt 32 min
  4. R408-04 Health and the 24/7 market 32 min
  5. R408-05 When to stop 32 min
  6. R408-06 If you continue 33 min

R409 · 4.6 hours · 7 lessons

Grid, DCA, and Rule-Based Automation

Opens with CITIC Pacific, 20 October 2008. The Hong Kong listed company issued a profit warning disclosing losses of about HK$15.5B on leveraged foreign exchange contracts, a figure representing roughly 80 percent of its aggregate after-tax profit for the preceding two financial years. Source: federalreserve.gov

  1. R409-01 Grid mechanics from first principles 42 min by hand
  2. R409-02 The arithmetic the interfaces hide 42 min by hand
  3. R409-03 The structural insight: a grid is a short-volatility position 32 min
  4. R409-04 Grid variants and their risk changes 42 min by hand
  5. R409-05 Configuration as a risk decision 41 min by hand
  6. R409-06 DCA and averaging bots 42 min by hand
  7. R409-07 Regime dependence, which is the whole game 33 min
R409-L1 Grid By Hand Computational lab open now

Configure a grid on paper: range from measured volatility, geometric spacing, grid count, capital per level, fee-adjusted profit per cycle, required oscillation frequency, and full breach accounting on both sides. No bot interface permitted.

R409-L2 The Trend Test Computational lab open now

One grid configuration across a ranging period, a strong uptrend and a strong downtrend, with fees and funding, against holding. Pass requires producing the regime in which the configuration loses badly and the arithmetic of why.

R409-L3 Martingale Depth Computational lab open now

For a supplied DCA bot configuration, compute the maximum deviation coverage by hand and compare it against the instrument's three largest historical drawdowns. State what you hold, and at what average price, if coverage is exhausted.

R410 · 3.4 hours · 6 lessons

Copy Trading, Vaults, and Agentic Execution

Opens with Mirror Trading International, charged 30 June 2022. The CFTC filed a civil enforcement action against Cornelius Johannes Steynberg and Mirror Trading International, alleging that from about May 2018 to March 2021 he ran an international multilevel marketing scheme soliciting bitcoin for a commodity pool, on the promise that a proprietary trading bot would trade foreign exchange on members' behalf. Source: cnbc.com

  1. R410-01 The incentive structure, first 32 min
  2. R410-02 Leaderboard forensics 32 min
  3. R410-03 The mechanics that erode the copy 42 min by hand
  4. R410-04 Vaults and delegated liquidity 32 min
  5. R410-05 Agentic execution and AI trading 32 min
  6. R410-06 The delegation decision framework 33 min
R410-L Due diligence on a live leader Reviewed artifact open now

For a supplied leader: reconstruct the full return series including drawdown, estimate the leader's own capital at risk, compute what your realized return would have been after latency, slippage and fees at your size, and write an accept or reject with the disqualifying answer named.

R411 · 3.2 hours · 6 lessons

Building, Validating, and Operating Your Own Automation

Opens with Ariane 5 Flight 501, 4 June 1996. Thirty-seven seconds after the start of the main engine ignition sequence, the launcher lost all guidance and attitude information, veered off its flight path, broke up and exploded at an altitude of about 3,700 meters. Source: en.wikipedia.org

  1. R411-01 From rules to code 32 min
  2. R411-02 Backtesting automation honestly 32 min
  3. R411-03 Paper and staged deployment 32 min
  4. R411-04 Operating the system 32 min
  5. R411-05 Risk controls in the machine 32 min
  6. R411-06 Reviewing automated performance 33 min
R411-L The Full Pipeline Reviewed artifact open now

Take one strategy from hypothesis through specification, backtest with walk-forward validation, paper deployment with realistic fills, and a written go/no-go decision with pre-committed deployment criteria, risk limits, monitoring plan, and shutdown conditions. A rigorous rejection is a passing outcome.

The gate

The Risk Practical

7 pass-required components plus 1 calibration measurement, shown to you and never failed. Every pass-required component has to pass on its own; there is no averaging across them.

Before you can be examined

  • Current, unexpired Freshman custody certificate (XA-C)
  • Sophomore gate passed
  • Passed Pre-Leverage Risk Exam covering position sizing, drawdown math, expectancy, and probability of ruin
  • Signed acknowledgment of base rates, stating each finding on its own: 74 to 89 percent of retail CFD accounts lost money in the EU regulators' 2018 data, and 97 percent of Brazilian index-futures day traders who persisted more than 300 days lost money net of fees
ComponentPass standardRequirement
100 simulated tradesPerformance lab Position size computed from risk budget and stop distance before every entry; adherence score at or above 90 percent against the learner's own written plan; zero instances of moving a stop against the position; zero breaches of stated circuit breakers. Scored on process adherence, not profit and loss. Pass required
Liquidation mathematics examComputational lab 18/20 hand-computed, timed. Pass required
Defended trading planReviewed artifact Reviewed against the learner's IPS and risk capacity from Orientation. Internal contradictions are failures. Pass required
Strategy validation artifactReviewed artifact A pre-registered test of one of the learner's own strategies with the verdict the evidence supports, and the planted flaws found in a supplied overfit strategy. Pass required
Monte Carlo reportComputational lab On the learner's own parameters, with a stated ruin probability the learner can defend. Pass required
Final calibration testCalibration Full arc reported from Orientation baseline through all four gates. Measured, shown to you
Automation risk memoReviewed artifact For any automated system the learner runs or proposes: strategy logic, regime dependence, fee-adjusted expectancy, maximum drawdown from walk-forward testing, failure mode, kill-switch design, and correlation with the learner's other positions. Pass required
Grid and DCA mathematics examComputational lab Hand-computed: fee-adjusted profit per cycle, required oscillation frequency, breach accounting both directions, and maximum deviation coverage on a martingale-scaled DCA configuration. 18/20. Pass required

On passing

XA-R XDRIP Academy Certificate in Risk-Managed Trading

Valid for 24 months. Renewal: A fresh adherence-scored simulated block.

  • A learner who finishes profitable but with 60 percent adherence fails. A learner who finishes down 4 percent with 97 percent adherence passes. Publishing this rule is the single most credible thing the Academy can do.
  • The simulator's leverage functionality does not unlock without the entry gate.

After Year Four

GraduateSpecialization Tracks

Professional credentialing and enterprise revenue. Entry requires the relevant undergraduate gates. An authored track lists its courses and lessons; the others are topic lists until they are written.

G1 · 12.3 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Junior

On-Chain Analyst

Strongest individual demand.

G101 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

Querying On-Chain Data

Opens with FTX and its affiliate Alameda Research, November 2022. The failure was off the chain, an estimated 8 billion dollar hole between customer balances and what remained, but the warning was on it. Source: nansen.ai

  1. G101-01 What the chain records, and the run FTX could not hide 30 min
  2. G101-02 Schema literacy: accounts, transactions, logs, and events 30 min
  3. G101-03 Aggregating with SQL and Dune 30 min
  4. G101-04 What a query cannot tell you 30 min

G102 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

Wallet Clustering and Heuristics

Opens with The Bitfinex hack of August 2016 and its unwinding in 2022. About 120,000 bitcoin was stolen and then sat, mostly unmoved, for years. Source: justice.gov

  1. G102-01 The common-input-ownership heuristic 30 min
  2. G102-02 Change addresses and behavioral fingerprints 30 min
  3. G102-03 Clustering across services and chains 31 min
  4. G102-04 When a heuristic is wrong 31 min

G103 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Fund-Flow Tracing and Forensics

Opens with The Colonial Pipeline ransom, May 2021. The operator paid the DarkSide group about 75 bitcoin to restore a fuel pipeline serving the US East Coast. Source: justice.gov

  1. G103-01 Following a transfer graph 30 min
  2. G103-02 Through a mixer, and the peel chain 31 min
  3. G103-03 Across bridges and chains 31 min
  4. G103-04 The endpoint: exchange, seizure, or dead end 31 min

G104 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

MEV Analysis

Opens with The MEV sandwich reversal of 3 April 2023. Sandwich bots make money by surrounding a victim's trade, buying just before it and selling just after to skim the price move they caused, and they had extracted value on Ethereum this way for years. Source: coinbase.com

  1. G104-01 What MEV is, and where it lives in the block 30 min
  2. G104-02 Reading a sandwich 30 min
  3. G104-03 Arbitrage, liquidations, and backrunning 31 min
  4. G104-04 The MEV supply chain: builders, relays, and the reversal 31 min

G105 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Protocol Financial Statements

Opens with Anchor Protocol and Terra, culminating in May 2022. Anchor paid depositors about 19.5 percent on the UST stablecoin, and where that yield came from was readable on-chain: not from borrower demand, which was far smaller than the deposits, but from a yield reserve that was visibly draining and had to be topped up with a roughly 450 million dollar injection in February 2022. Source: chainalysis.com

  1. G105-01 A protocol's balance sheet on-chain 31 min
  2. G105-02 Where the yield actually comes from 31 min
  3. G105-03 Solvency, and reading a run 31 min
  4. G105-04 The off-chain hole a query cannot see 31 min

G106 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

The Research Report

Opens with Mango Markets, October 2022. Avraham Eisenberg drained about 110 million dollars by manipulating the price of the MNGO token to borrow against a position he had inflated, then publicly described it as a highly profitable trading strategy that he believed was legal. Source: cftc.gov

  1. G106-01 An on-chain claim, and the confidence it supports 31 min
  2. G106-02 Attribution: tying an address to an actor 31 min
  3. G106-03 Writing the report 31 min
  4. G106-04 Defending it against someone who pushes back 31 min

G2 · 12.2 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Junior

Security and Self-Audit

Explicit handoff to Cyfrin Updraft's SSCD+ path for anyone going further.

G201 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

Invariant Thinking

Opens with The Nomad bridge, 1 August 2022. In a routine upgrade Nomad initialized the value of a trusted message root to 0x00. Source: medium.com

  1. G201-01 What an invariant is, and the one Nomad turned off 30 min
  2. G201-02 Writing the invariants of a position you hold 29 min
  3. G201-03 The invariant enforced by an assumption 30 min
  4. G201-04 The invariant nobody wrote down 30 min

G202 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

Vulnerability Classes a User Must Understand

Opens with Cream Finance, 27 October 2021, its third flash-loan exploit of the year, for about 130 million dollars. The attacker flash-borrowed DAI from Maker, minted a large amount of the yUSD share token, then donated Yearn Curve tokens straight into the vault so that the vault's reported price per share doubled. Source: medium.com

  1. G202-01 Oracle and price manipulation 30 min
  2. G202-02 The missing access check 30 min
  3. G202-03 Reentrancy, and the order of operations 30 min
  4. G202-04 Economic and governance attacks 30 min

G203 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

Reading Audit Reports

Opens with Merlin DEX on zkSync, 26 April 2023. The team had said its pools would open only after CertiK finished its audit; the 14 April report found no critical issues and gave the protocol a security score of 90. Source: unchainedcrypto.com

  1. G203-01 What an audit is, and what Merlin's did not say 30 min
  2. G203-02 Scope, findings, and severity 30 min
  3. G203-03 The centralization finding you cannot audit away 30 min
  4. G203-04 The audit that found it 30 min

G204 · 2 hours · 4 lessons

Tools a Non-Developer Can Run

Opens with Compound governance Proposal 062, executed 30 September 2021. The upgrade split COMP rewards by a governance-set ratio, and one line of the new Comptroller compared a value with the greater-than operator where it needed greater-than-or-equal. Source: comp.xyz

  1. G204-01 Reading a contract without reading code 30 min
  2. G204-02 Simulating a transaction before you sign 29 min
  3. G204-03 Checking and revoking approvals 30 min
  4. G204-04 Static analysis output a user can read 29 min

G205 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Monitoring, Alerting, and Response

Opens with The Ronin bridge, which settles the Axie Infinity game, 23 March 2022, about 625 million dollars. An attacker used five of the nine validator keys that authorize a withdrawal: four held by Sky Mavis and a fifth belonging to the Axie DAO, whose signing permission Sky Mavis had been granted months earlier to clear a backlog and had never revoked. Source: rekt.news

  1. G205-01 What to watch, and the outflow nobody watched 30 min
  2. G205-02 The compromise that leaves no on-chain trace 31 min
  3. G205-03 Detection is the longest clock 31 min
  4. G205-04 Your runbook when a position is at risk 31 min

G206 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Running a Security Review for a Small Team

Opens with Radiant Capital, 16 October 2024, about 50 million dollars. Three developers, long-standing contributors on hardware wallets and in different countries, each signed what their Gnosis Safe front-end showed as a routine transaction. Source: rekt.news

  1. G206-01 The review a small team can actually run 31 min
  2. G206-02 Blind signing, and verifying the payload 31 min
  3. G206-03 The public function that should have been caught 30 min
  4. G206-04 Who holds the keys 31 min

G3 · 13.5 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Freshman

Builder Bridge

Deliberately shallow and deliberately short. We do not compete with best-in-class free developer education; we prepare people for it and say so.

G301 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Solidity Mental Models

Opens with Rubixi, 2016. Rubixi was a smart contract for a pyramid-style game whose developer had renamed the contract from an earlier name but had not renamed its constructor, the special function that runs once at deployment to set the owner. Source: consensys.github.io

  1. G301-01 A contract does what it says, not what you meant 33 min
  2. G301-02 Access control: who is allowed to call this 33 min
  3. G301-03 It is live and adversarial the moment it deploys 33 min
  4. G301-04 Immutable: one mistake can be permanent and total 34 min

G302 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

The EVM: Gas, Calls, and Reverts

Opens with GovernMental, 2016. GovernMental was a Ponzi-style game that kept a growing list of every participant, and paying out required looping over and clearing that entire list. Source: consensys.github.io

  1. G302-01 The EVM executes, and it charges gas 34 min
  2. G302-02 An external call can fail, and returns a value 34 min
  3. G302-03 Reentrancy: the call that calls back 33 min
  4. G302-04 Arithmetic: overflow, and why the checks exist 34 min

G303 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Storage, Upgrades, and Trust

Opens with Team Finance, October 2022. Team Finance provided token-locking services, and during a migration that moved liquidity from one version of an exchange to another, a flaw in the migration logic let an attacker manipulate the process and drain about 14.5 million dollars. Source: rekt.news

  1. G303-01 How state is really laid out 33 min
  2. G303-02 Upgradeability is power that must be guarded 33 min
  3. G303-03 Trusting caller-supplied data and external code 33 min
  4. G303-04 Return values, and tokens that misbehave 33 min

G304 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Testing and the Toolchain

Opens with Yam Finance, August 2020. Yam launched to enormous demand, holding hundreds of millions of dollars in value within days, on a contract that had not been audited. Source: medium.com

  1. G304-01 Test the unhappy path you did not imagine 34 min
  2. G304-02 Edge cases, and the math you did not fuzz 34 min
  3. G304-03 Shipping unaudited: the cost of skipping the work 34 min
  4. G304-04 The migration and deployment checklist 34 min

G305 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Reading Contracts Fluently

Opens with Meerkat Finance, March 2021. Meerkat Finance was a yield vault that launched on BNB Chain and, a day later, drained about 31 million dollars of user deposits. Source: rekt.news

  1. G305-01 Read who controls it: owner, upgrade, and mint 34 min
  2. G305-02 Read the transfer and burn functions for hidden behavior 34 min
  3. G305-03 Read the accounting and the reward math 34 min
  4. G305-04 Read the inputs it trusts, and the ones it does not check 34 min

G306 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

The Handoff: Learning to Build Safely

Opens with Value DeFi, November 2020. Value DeFi's interface carried a confident banner to the effect that flash loans could not manipulate its price oracle. Source: rekt.news

  1. G306-01 The hubris of knowing a little 34 min
  2. G306-02 The audit, and the limits of an audit 33 min
  3. G306-03 The practices and tools real builders live by 33 min
  4. G306-04 Where to go next, and the honest handoff 34 min

G4 · 13 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Junior

Institutional and Compliance

The enterprise product. Likely strongest enterprise demand alongside G6.

G401 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Custody Operations and Key Ceremonies

Opens with QuadrigaCX, 2019. Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange collapsed after its founder, Gerald Cotten, died in December 2018 as, the company said, the only person with the keys to its cold wallets, and about 190 million Canadian dollars in customer assets was declared inaccessible. Source: osc.ca

  1. G401-01 The single key, and QuadrigaCX 30 min
  2. G401-02 The key ceremony 31 min
  3. G401-03 Multisig governance for an institution 31 min
  4. G401-04 MPC and the shape of key material 31 min

G402 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Treasury and Operational Controls

Opens with Prime Trust, 2023. A Nevada-chartered custodian that held assets for other crypto businesses was taken over by state regulators in June 2023 with a shortfall later put in the tens of millions of dollars. Source: coindesk.com

  1. G402-01 Segregation of duties 31 min
  2. G402-02 The hot-cold boundary at institutional scale 31 min
  3. G402-03 Reconciliation, and the shortfall caught too late 31 min
  4. G402-04 Change management and the four-eyes rule 32 min

G403 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

The Regulatory Map

Opens with SEC versus Ripple, filed December 2020. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple Labs alleging its XRP token was an unregistered security. Source: sec.gov

  1. G403-01 Is it a security: the question under everything 32 min
  2. G403-02 The US map: the SEC, the CFTC, and the taxonomy 32 min
  3. G403-03 GENIUS, CLARITY, and reading a law in flux 33 min
  4. G403-04 MiCA and the cross-border reality 32 min

G404 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

AML, KYC, and the Travel Rule

Opens with Binance, November 2023. The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world agreed to pay about 4.3 billion dollars to settle US charges that it had operated for years with wilfully deficient anti-money-laundering controls, and its founder pleaded guilty and stepped down. Source: justice.gov

  1. G404-01 Why AML exists, and what Binance paid to learn it 32 min
  2. G404-02 KYC and the risk-based approach 32 min
  3. G404-03 The Travel Rule, on-chain 33 min
  4. G404-04 Sanctions screening and the block 32 min

G405 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Blockchain Analytics from the Compliance Side

Opens with Suex, September 2021. The US Treasury's OFAC sanctioned Suex, a cryptocurrency exchange, the first such designation of a crypto exchange, for acting as a conduit that laundered proceeds for ransomware operators and other criminals. Source: home.treasury.gov

  1. G405-01 Screening an address before you touch it 32 min
  2. G405-02 Tracing for a suspicious activity report 32 min
  3. G405-03 Typologies: what laundering looks like to a compliance desk 33 min
  4. G405-04 The false positive and the cost of being wrong 33 min

G406 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Audit, Reporting, and the Board

Opens with Gemini Earn and Genesis, 2022 to 2023. Gemini offered retail customers a yield product, Earn, that lent their assets to Genesis, a lender that abruptly froze withdrawals in November 2022, trapping around 900 million dollars belonging to roughly 340,000 Earn users. Source: sec.gov

  1. G406-01 What an attestation proves, and Gemini Earn 32 min
  2. G406-02 Financial reporting a regulator will accept 32 min
  3. G406-03 Communicating risk to a board 33 min
  4. G406-04 The disclosure that was owed 33 min

G5 · 13.5 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Senior

Professional Trader

G501 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Market Making and Liquidity Provision

Opens with Ronin Capital, March 2020. Ronin was a proprietary trading firm and market maker that stood ready to buy and sell across many markets, and in the extreme volatility of mid-March 2020 it took losses large enough that it could not meet the margin its clearinghouse required. Source: cmegroup.com

  1. G501-01 Making markets means carrying inventory risk 34 min
  2. G501-02 The spread is payment for risk, not a free lunch 33 min
  3. G501-03 How a market maker handles your order 34 min
  4. G501-04 Risk controls at machine speed 34 min

G502 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Quantitative Methods and Model Risk

Opens with Two Sigma, disclosed 2023. Two Sigma is one of the most sophisticated quantitative hedge funds in the world, running strategies built and governed by teams of scientists, and it disclosed that one of its own researchers had made unauthorized changes to the firm's trading models, adjusting them in ways that boosted some funds and hurt others and produced around 170 million dollars of unintended profit-and-loss swings the firm had not sanctioned. Source: sec.gov

  1. G502-01 A model is a lever on real money 33 min
  2. G502-02 Model governance: who can change what 33 min
  3. G502-03 Marking to model, and marking to hope 33 min
  4. G502-04 When the numbers are a story you tell yourself 34 min

G503 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Risk Systems and Position Limits

Opens with The JPMorgan London Whale, 2012. A trader in JPMorgan's Chief Investment Office, nicknamed the London Whale for the size of his positions, built an enormous book of credit derivatives that grew until it could not be exited without moving the market against itself. Source: sec.gov

  1. G503-01 A limit is only a control if it binds 34 min
  2. G503-02 Value at risk, and what it does not see 34 min
  3. G503-03 The loss hidden inside the model 34 min
  4. G503-04 Concentration: the position you cannot exit 34 min

G504 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

The Rogue Trader and the Control Failure

Opens with Societe Generale and Jerome Kerviel, 2008. Kerviel, a trader at the French bank Societe Generale, built enormous unauthorized directional positions, tens of billions of euros in notional, and hid them by entering fictitious offsetting trades that made his book appear balanced and within limits. Source: sec.gov

  1. G504-01 The rogue trader is a control failure first 33 min
  2. G504-02 Segregation of duties, and why it exists 33 min
  3. G504-03 Reconciliation catches the trade that is not there 33 min
  4. G504-04 The hidden loss always grows 33 min

G505 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

The Retail and Funded-Account Landscape

Opens with Banc De Binary, 2016. Banc De Binary was one of the largest sellers of binary options to retail customers, marketing them as a simple way to profit from a market moving up or down, and regulators found it had operated illegally in the United States and misled customers; it paid settlements to the CFTC and SEC totaling around 11 million dollars and shut down. Source: cftc.gov

  1. G505-01 Ask how the business makes money 34 min
  2. G505-02 Copy trading and the economics of the platform 34 min
  3. G505-03 The funded-account challenge, and who profits 34 min
  4. G505-04 When the product is designed for you to lose 34 min

G506 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Building a Track Record That Survives Due Diligence

Opens with The Galleon Group and Raj Rajaratnam, 2009. Rajaratnam ran the Galleon Group, a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund with a track record that had attracted serious institutional money, and it emerged that a meaningful part of his edge came from illegal insider information, not skill; he was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to eleven years in prison, and Galleon collapsed. Source: sec.gov

  1. G506-01 A track record is how the numbers were made 33 min
  2. G506-02 What due diligence actually checks 34 min
  3. G506-03 Survivorship, selection, and the record you show 33 min
  4. G506-04 The record that cannot answer the second question 34 min

G6 · 13 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Sophomore

Payments and Stablecoin Operations

The most forward-looking track and the one most likely to matter commercially in three years.

G601 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Stablecoin Mechanics and Issuer Risk

Opens with Binance USD (BUSD), February 2023. BUSD was a dollar stablecoin issued by Paxos, fully reserved and regulated, and by that month one of the largest in the world. Source: dfs.ny.gov

  1. G601-01 What a stablecoin promises, and who can revoke it 32 min
  2. G601-02 Reserves, redemption, and the run 32 min
  3. G601-03 How a peg is actually held 32 min
  4. G601-04 The freeze switch 32 min

G602 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Merchant Acceptance and Settlement Rails

Opens with Silvergate Bank and the Silvergate Exchange Network, March 2023. Silvergate was a small California bank that had become critical plumbing for the industry: its Silvergate Exchange Network let exchanges and trading firms move US dollars between each other instantly, around the clock, which is what real payments and settlement need. Source: federalreserve.gov

  1. G602-01 Accepting a payment is settling it 32 min
  2. G602-02 The merchant's real risks: volatility, finality, and the refund 32 min
  3. G602-03 The on-ramp and off-ramp between dollars and crypto 32 min
  4. G602-04 Concentration: when the rail is a single point of failure 32 min

G603 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Payroll, Contractors, and Held Balances

Opens with Synapse and Evolve Bank, 2024. Synapse was a middleware company that connected consumer fintech apps to a partner bank, Evolve, so apps could offer accounts, payroll and payments without being banks themselves. Source: federalreserve.gov

  1. G603-01 Who holds the balance, and can they prove it 33 min
  2. G603-02 Paying a workforce: batch payments and their failure modes 32 min
  3. G603-03 Contractors, cross-border, and the compliance that attaches 32 min
  4. G603-04 Reconciling a payment ledger you do not control 33 min

G604 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Cross-Border Settlement and Corridor Economics

Opens with The Bangladesh Bank heist, February 2016. Attackers who had penetrated the Bangladesh central bank's systems sent fraudulent payment instructions over SWIFT, the messaging network banks use to move money across borders, requesting nearly a billion dollars be transferred out of its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Source: newyorkfed.org

  1. G604-01 A cross-border payment is a chain of trust 33 min
  2. G604-02 Corridors: liquidity, correspondents, and cost 33 min
  3. G604-03 Settlement risk and finality across borders 33 min
  4. G604-04 Where stablecoins change the corridor, and where they do not 33 min

G605 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

The GENIUS Compliance Surface

Opens with The New York Attorney General settlement with Tether and Bitfinex, February 2021. Tether issued the largest dollar stablecoin, USDT, on the representation that each token was backed one for one by dollars in reserve. Source: ag.ny.gov

  1. G605-01 What GENIUS makes checkable 33 min
  2. G605-02 Reserves and redemption as legal obligations 33 min
  3. G605-03 The issuer as a regulated entity 33 min
  4. G605-04 AML on a stablecoin the world can hold 33 min

G606 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Agentic Payments and the Machine-to-Machine Economy

Opens with Citibank's mistaken payment to Revlon's lenders, August 2020. Citibank, acting as agent on a Revlon loan, meant to send a roughly 8 million dollar interest payment. Source: courtlistener.com

  1. G606-01 The payment that could not be undone 33 min
  2. G606-02 Giving software the authority to pay 33 min
  3. G606-03 Reputation and staking: trusting an agent 33 min
  4. G606-04 The micropayment economy, and the limits that make it safe 34 min

G7 · 12.7 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Junior

Educator and Community

Requires Junior plus any one graduate track. Feeds the instructor pipeline and the licensing model, and is the assessor pipeline: hand-marked artifacts are reviewed by named assessors on a ten-day turnaround, and this track is where the next assessors come from.

G701 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

How to Teach This Material

Opens with Fernandes, Lynch and Netemeyer, Management Science, 2014. A meta-analysis of 168 papers covering 201 studies of financial literacy and financial education found that interventions to improve financial literacy explained 0.1 percent of the variance in the financial behaviors studied, with weaker effects in low-income samples, and that the effect of financial education decays with time: even large interventions with many hours of instruction had negligible effects on behavior 20 months or more after delivery. Source: papers.ssrn.com

  1. G701-01 What teaching this material has to overcome 32 min
  2. G701-02 The autopsy method: teaching from a documented failure 33 min
  3. G701-03 Assessment that measures instead of certifies 33 min
  4. G701-04 The Academy's methods, and why each one exists 33 min

G702 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Pedagogical Fundamentals

Opens with Kornell and Bjork, Psychological Science, 2008. Participants studied paintings by twelve artists, some artists' works presented together and some interleaved with other artists', then were tested on classifying new paintings. Source: journals.sagepub.com

  1. G702-01 Retrieval and spacing, against the feeling of learning 31 min
  2. G702-02 Metacognition: teaching people to know what they know 32 min
  3. G702-03 Worked examples and cognitive load 32 min
  4. G702-04 Transfer: from a passed quiz to a changed decision 32 min

G703 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Disclosure Ethics and How Crypto Educators Get Compromised

Opens with SEC v. Kim Kardashian, 3 October 2022. Source: sec.gov

  1. G703-01 The compensated voice 32 min
  2. G703-02 Directed silence: when the sponsor tells you not to disclose 31 min
  3. G703-03 The educator who became the funnel 31 min
  4. G703-04 The disclosure rule you will actually follow 31 min

G704 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Community Moderation

Opens with The Bored Ape Yacht Club Discord, 4 June 2022. The Discord account of the project's community manager was compromised and used to post a phishing link, dressed as an exclusive giveaway for holders, in the official BAYC and Otherside servers. Source: coindesk.com

  1. G704-01 The server is the attack surface 31 min
  2. G704-02 Admin accounts and the privilege ladder 32 min
  3. G704-03 Social engineering of the people who hold the keys 32 min
  4. G704-04 The recovery scam inside your own community 32 min

G705 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Scam Response for Community Leaders

Opens with Ronin Network, 23 to 29 March 2022. An attacker used five of the bridge's nine validator keys to withdraw 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC, about $625 million, in two transactions. Source: thehackernews.com

  1. G705-01 The first hour, at community scale 32 min
  2. G705-02 Containment and the response clock 32 min
  3. G705-03 Detection, disclosure and the cost of silence 31 min
  4. G705-04 After: the second wave and the postmortem 31 min

G706 · 2.1 hours · 4 lessons

Running a Cohort

Opens with CFPB v. BloomTech and Austen Allred, 17 April 2024. Source: science.org

  1. G706-01 Cohorts, completion and the honest number 31 min
  2. G706-02 Promises you can keep 31 min
  3. G706-03 When the institution fails the student 31 min
  4. G706-04 Marking under pressure: assessment integrity 33 min

G8 · 13.4 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Junior

Tokenized Finance and RWA Structuring

Requires J310. Aimed at issuers, asset managers, fund operations staff, and the legal-adjacent roles this sector is hiring for fastest.

G801 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Securities Law for Tokenized Assets

Opens with Telegram and the TON blockchain, 2020. Telegram raised about 1.7 billion dollars from investors by selling rights to a token, Gram, that it planned to launch on its TON blockchain, treating the sale as an ordinary technology fundraising. Source: sec.gov

  1. G801-01 Is the token a security 33 min
  2. G801-02 What registration and disclosure require 32 min
  3. G801-03 Exemptions, and the conditions that come with them 32 min
  4. G801-04 The tokenized asset that is a security, and what follows 33 min

G802 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

The SPV and Bankruptcy Remoteness

Opens with Enron, 2001. Enron used special-purpose vehicles, separate legal entities, to move debt and risky assets off its own balance sheet, and the whole point of such a vehicle is to isolate assets and liabilities from the parent so each stands on its own. Source: sec.gov

  1. G802-01 Why the SPV exists 33 min
  2. G802-02 Bankruptcy remoteness, and what breaks it 33 min
  3. G802-03 The claim the token actually represents 33 min
  4. G802-04 When the sponsor fails: does the asset survive 33 min

G803 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Custody, Attestation, and the Off-Chain Link

Opens with The Qingdao port metals fraud, 2014. At the port of Qingdao in China, a trading company used warehouse receipts, documents certifying that specific metal, copper and aluminum, was held in a warehouse, to borrow money, and it pledged the same metal to multiple lenders at once, and in cases the metal was not there in the quantities the receipts claimed. Source: reuters.com

  1. G803-01 The token is a receipt for an off-chain asset 33 min
  2. G803-02 Custodian selection: who actually holds the asset 33 min
  3. G803-03 Attestation: proving the asset is there, and pledged once 33 min
  4. G803-04 Transfer agent and registry: one record, on-chain and off 34 min

G804 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Programmable Compliance and Valuation Governance

Opens with Abraaj Group, 2018. Abraaj was one of the largest private-equity firms in emerging markets, managing billions, and it collapsed after investors questioned what had happened to money in its funds. Source: sec.gov

  1. G804-01 The value is a claim until it is governed 33 min
  2. G804-02 NAV, and the independent valuation that anchors it 33 min
  3. G804-03 Oracles for a real-world asset: pricing what is off-chain 34 min
  4. G804-04 Programmable compliance: the rules a token enforces on itself 33 min

G805 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Redemption, Gating, and Secondary Liquidity

Opens with The Woodford Equity Income Fund, 2019. This was a large, popular UK investment fund that let ordinary investors put money in and take it out on demand, an open-ended, daily-dealing fund, while it held a growing portion of its money in illiquid assets that could not be sold quickly. Source: fca.org.uk

  1. G805-01 The liquidity mismatch: instant token, illiquid asset 34 min
  2. G805-02 Redemption engineering: honoring the token with the underlying 34 min
  3. G805-03 Gating provisions: designing the pause before the run 34 min
  4. G805-04 Secondary market liquidity for a restricted token 34 min

G806 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Cross-Border Distribution and RWA as Collateral

Opens with Maple Finance and Orthogonal Trading, December 2022. Maple ran on-chain lending pools where lenders deposited funds that were lent to vetted borrowers, a way of bringing real-world credit on-chain, and Orthogonal Trading was one of its large borrowers. Source: maple.finance

  1. G806-01 Credit risk comes through the on-chain door 34 min
  2. G806-02 Cross-border distribution under MiCA and comparable regimes 34 min
  3. G806-03 RWA as DeFi collateral: inheriting the underlying's risk 34 min
  4. G806-04 Composability, and how one default spreads 34 min

G9 · 13.4 hours measured · 24 lessons · after Senior

Systematic Trading Engineering

Requires the full Automation Block. The bridge from 'I use a bot platform' to 'I operate a system'.

G901 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Market Data and Its Failure Modes

Opens with The Facebook IPO on Nasdaq, 18 May 2012. Nasdaq's system for opening the most anticipated IPO in years entered a loop in its order-matching software under a flood of orders and cancellations, and for over two hours it could not tell firms whether their orders had executed. Source: sec.gov

  1. G901-01 Your system is only as good as its data feed 34 min
  2. G901-02 Acting on unverified data: the signal that was a lie 34 min
  3. G901-03 When the feed goes dark 34 min
  4. G901-04 The consolidated feed is a single point of failure 34 min

G902 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Exchange and Venue APIs

Opens with BitMEX during the crash of 12 to 13 March 2020. As the price of Bitcoin fell by nearly half in a day, the crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX went offline for about 25 minutes at the worst moment, which it attributed to a hardware issue and a denial-of-service attack. Source: blog.bitmex.com

  1. G902-01 A venue is infrastructure that goes down under load 34 min
  2. G902-02 Rate limits and reachability when everyone trades at once 33 min
  3. G902-03 The venue can cut you off 34 min
  4. G902-04 Even the largest exchange can go dark 33 min

G903 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Order Management and Reconciliation

Opens with The BATS IPO, 23 March 2012. BATS, an electronic exchange, listed its own shares on its own exchange, and a bug in its matching engine's handling of symbols in a particular range caused its own stock to collapse from about 16 dollars to fractions of a cent in under a second, and also produced an erroneous print in Apple that triggered a brief halt. Source: sec.gov

  1. G903-01 The order-management layer, and the state it must not lose 33 min
  2. G903-02 The fat finger, and the order you cannot cancel 33 min
  3. G903-03 Reconciliation: knowing what you actually did 33 min
  4. G903-04 Gross versus net, and the control that catches it 33 min

G904 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Execution Algorithms

Opens with Waddell and Reed and the Flash Crash, 6 May 2010. A large asset manager used an automated execution algorithm to sell about 4.1 billion dollars of stock-index futures to hedge a position, and the algorithm was set to target a fixed percentage of trading volume with no limit on price and no limit on time. Source: sec.gov

  1. G904-01 An execution algorithm needs price and time limits 34 min
  2. G904-02 Executing into thin liquidity 33 min
  3. G904-03 The erroneous order sent to the market 33 min
  4. G904-04 Spoofing: the orders you never meant to fill 34 min

G905 · 2.2 hours · 4 lessons

Backtesting and Validation

Opens with Victor Niederhoffer's fund, 1997. Niederhoffer was a celebrated systematic trader whose strategy included selling out-of-the-money options, collecting steady premiums that had worked for years and looked excellent in the record. Source: sec.gov

  1. G905-01 The backtest that hid the tail 33 min
  2. G905-02 Overfitting: a pattern that was only noise 33 min
  3. G905-03 The regime your data never contained 34 min
  4. G905-04 Chasing a signal that means nothing 33 min

G906 · 2.3 hours · 4 lessons

Live Risk and Kill Switches

Opens with Infinium Capital Management, February 2010. Infinium deployed a new automated trading program to trade a crude-oil fund, and the program had not been fully tested; within its first seconds live it malfunctioned and sent roughly 6,767 orders in about two seconds before anyone could stop it, disrupting the market and drawing a regulatory penalty. Source: cftc.gov

  1. G906-01 The kill switch that stops it faster than a human 34 min
  2. G906-02 Risk limits and the loss your model said was impossible 34 min
  3. G906-03 Your algorithm's market impact is your responsibility 34 min
  4. G906-04 Running strategies on other people's capital 34 min

Generated 2026-09-18 from src/lib/curriculum by npm run guide. Lesson ids are the same ones used on the site: a lesson lives at xdripacademy.com/learn/<id>. Minutes are measured from each lesson's page: reading at 180 words a minute, plus its assessment items, worked examples, by-hand work and cards. They measure the lesson, not you. Labs are not included and carry no hour figure until each has a stated one; some run over elapsed days that are stated on the lab.