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[Teaching] Lecture series on decentralized public goods at Amrita University

Week-long lecture series on developing decentralized networks to deliver digital public goods.

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I was invited to give a week of lectures to undergraduate and Masters students in the Cybersecurity faculty at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University in Kollam, India – with students joining remotely from their Coimbatore campus. The university is ranked 7th in India (NIRF 2024) and has a particularly strong cybersecurity research unit. The course summary is below, followed by some screenshots from the first lecture.

I. Introduction to Web3

Web3’s core value proposition
From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0
Trust & trust-minimization
Decentralization
Public, open blockchains
Deterministic state machines
Decentralized app architecture
Problems facing Web3
Anti-centralization mechanisms
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II. Decentralized End-to-end Encryption

Corporate & state surveillance
Privacy as a human right
Security, privacy & trust-minimization for data sharing Threshold Decryption & Distributed Key Generation
Cryptoeconomics & 2-sided market development
Decentralized end-to-end encryption layer

III. Ideating a Decentralized, Privacy-Preserving Application – Recap, Q&A & group brainstorming session