Go from DeFi fundamentals to running your own perpetuals venue — learn the mechanics, then survive the crises that test them.
You've been hired as employee #1 at a startup building an on-chain perpetuals exchange. Over the next weeks you'll master the math that keeps a perp venue solvent, design its oracle and funding systems, and face the kind of live incidents that have killed real exchanges. Finish the path and you'll have seen the whole machine — from first principles to production fire drills.
Week 2 — Perps are your product. Learn how funding keeps the contract tethered to spot.
Master perpetual contracts from first principles — how funding rates maintain the peg, how liquidations work, how major perp DEXs are built, and how to trade them profitably.
Week 3 — Your mark price is only as good as your oracle. Design the price feed that won't get you drained.
Understand how blockchains access real-world data — Chainlink's decentralized oracle network, Pyth's high-frequency feeds, UMA's optimistic oracle, and how oracle design determines DeFi's security guarantees.
Incident #1 — The treasury needs to move size on-chain and the execution just went wrong. Contain the damage.
A 20,000 AAVE treasury sale through an intent auction prints 310bps below mid — diagnose the fill, contain the order, and keep the DAO's Aave position out of liquidation.
Week 5 — Now assemble the venue: margin, liquidations, insurance fund, and the trade-offs between designs.
Learn how financial derivatives work and how they are implemented in decentralized protocols. Covers options theory, perpetual futures, structured products, and on-chain risk management.
Week 6 — Your liquidations are someone else's MEV. Understand the dark forest your exchange lives in.
Master maximal extractable value — from mempool mechanics to Flashbots, PBS, and the evolving economics of block production.
