The Crypto course, section by section

What does the Crypto course teach, and in what order? This guide walks its road, the course's path of lessons, from your first coin to your own research. After reading it, you can find any topic, pick where to start and skip what you know.

What is the Crypto course?

When you choose a course, the Crypto card reads "Bitcoin, wallets, memecoins and DeFi". It assumes you know nothing.

Its 35 sections open one after another. Sections hold units, and each unit holds 8, 10 or 12 levels: short lessons of story cards and questions. Every unit is written, so nothing on this road says In the works.

The sections sit in three stages: Beginner foundations (1 to 9), Intermediate skills (10 to 19) and Advanced practice (20 to 35). The course map also groups them into seven regions, and the headings below follow those.

Easy to mix up: stages and regions. Both group the same 35 sections, so section 19 sits in the Intermediate stage but in the Memecoins region.

Twelve sections are shared with Stocks and Forex: 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 30, 31, 33 and 34, and section 10 with Macro too. A level you finish there counts in every course that has it, so you never repeat it, but each road still opens in order.

Foundations, sections 1 to 9

1. Your first crypto steps. What crypto, a coin, a key (the secret that lets you spend) and a price are, up to a first practice transfer.
2. Money, prices and markets. What a price quote measures and why a practice trade needs no real deposit. Choose what you are practicing opens it.
3. Read prices and build candlesticks. Candles, each showing the first, highest, lowest and last price in a stretch of time, plus timeframes (how long one candle covers) and volume (how much traded).
4. Networks, transactions and programs. How a network, the computers that keep a coin's shared record, accepts a transaction: blocks (batches of transactions), confirmations (later blocks that make it harder to reverse) and fees.
5. Custody, account access and safe routines. Who controls your coins, recovery phrases (also called seed phrases: the secret words that restore a wallet), approvals that let apps move your coins, and scams, all practiced with made-up credentials. Control is more than a screen opens it, and Wallets, keys and the seed phrase explains wallets.
6. Orders, fills, fees and slippage. A fill is an order going through. Market orders fill now, limit orders at your price or better, and stop orders are sent at a trigger price. Slippage is the gap between the price you expected and the price you got.
7. Risk, mindset and a repeatable routine. Sizing a trade from a loss budget (the most you accept losing on it), loss limits and a decision journal.
8. Spot venues, account history and execution. How a spot venue, a place to buy coins outright, records deposits, trades and withdrawals.
9. Evidence, economics and the news clock. Tracing claims to their source, and reading inflation and jobs releases.

Know some of this already? Say you know sections 1 and 2. Section 3's mastery test, on the course map, asks 10 questions from their levels. It has no hints and costs no energy, the daily allowance new questions use.

Get 9 or 10 right and the road moves to section 3, marking sections 1 and 2 Tested out. Miss two and the test stops, listing the units to review first.

Spot markets and on-chain, sections 10 to 18

10. Macro regimes, catalysts and event replay. The whole economy: rates, central banks and scheduled releases, studied by replaying past events step by step.
11. Crypto assets, supply and market evidence. Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins (coins built to track a currency) and how supply is counted.
12. Investigate a crypto project. A sourced write-up: real use, token rights, insider unlock dates (when locked coins become free to move) and the evidence against it.
13. Price structure and conditional scenarios. Chart readings turned into if-then scenarios, failures included.
14. Indicators and honest measurement. What an indicator calculates from past prices, when it fails and whether it beats a simple rule.
15. Build a conditional spot plan. A written plan with a horizon (how long it runs), size, costs and exits, where not trading stays an option.
16. Apply and review a spot plan. The plan run on changed cases, each decision judged on how it was made, not on whether it made money.
17. Read and use on-chain data. A token's amounts, fees and whether a transaction went through, read in the network's own records.
18. Pools, routes and executable liquidity. How a pool, a program that holds two tokens and swaps one for the other, prices a swap. Liquidity is how much you could really sell at a price right now. Two ways to quote opens it.

Memecoins, sections 19 to 22

A memecoin is a crypto asset tied to a meme, character or cultural theme. Memecoins are attention markets: money goes where attention flows, as What a memecoin is, and why attention is the market explains.

19. The launch mechanics and attention section. A coin's bonding curve, the rule that prices it by how much supply has sold, its move to a pool, then attention, incentives and exits. Three parties in a launch opens it.
20. Inspect token powers, distribution and evidence. Mint and freeze powers (who can create more of a token or block transfers), holders (the wallets that hold it), bundled buys (sent together in one batch) and volume claims. You check each one against the right record. What a token page is opens it.
21. Memecoin evidence and execution practice. New launch cases you have not seen: a written preflight check (the facts you record before a buy), a buy sized to the pool and planned exits. Staying out, with reasons, is a valid answer.
22. On-chain measurements and their limits. Where chain measures break: a transfer is not a sale, and an address, a wallet's public name, is not a person.

Finishing the Memecoin starter, the short way in, opens section 20 early.

Perps, DeFi and NFTs, sections 23 to 29

Perps are price contracts with no end date, DeFi is finance run by on-chain programs, and an NFT is a unique token. To practice perps with paper cash, see Paper trading perps: leverage, margin and funding.

23. Derivative contracts and perpetual markets. Derivatives, contracts whose value depends on an asset or rate, and why a perp never gives you the coin. Two ways to be exposed opens it.
24. Collateral, margin and liquidation accounting. Margin, the collateral (cash set aside) a position needs, and liquidation, the forced close when losses use it up.
25. Funding, open interest and liquidation evidence. Funding, a regular payment between traders who gain if the price rises and those who gain if it falls, and open interest, the contracts still open.
26. Manage contract exposure and account obligations. Exits, funding and several positions at once, run by a written plan.
27. Derivative decision and reconciliation practice. Cases where you check that fills, funding and fees add up, with no leverage (a position bigger than the cash behind it) or price prediction needed to finish.
28. DeFi claims, obligations and interacting risks. Lending, staking (locking coins to help secure a network), stablecoins and bridges that move coins between networks, traced through who owes what. The pool opens it.
29. Unique tokens, digital rights and thin markets. What an NFT controls, and how real rights and real offers to buy price it.

Pro desk, sections 30 to 35

30. Trade data, profiles and footprint foundations. Volume profiles and footprints: how much traded at each price, and whether a buyer or a seller started each trade.
31. Order flow, liquidity and competing explanations. Testing ideas about waiting orders and fast moves without claiming to see hidden ones.
32. Crypto execution and flow investigations. The same tools on crypto data, without pretending to know why an anonymous wallet traded.
33. Statistics, testing and advanced model limits. Returns, samples and tests on past data, and how luck can pass for skill.
34. Independent practice, review and readiness. A trade log, weekly reviews and a readiness review where deposits, profit and trading bigger are never required.
35. Independent crypto research and practice. Your own research process, tested on unseen cases, where finishing never means you are profitable. A question too big opens it.