A Beginner’s Guide to Becoming a Blockchain Developer with Overledger (FutureLearn)

Discover the basics of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to unlock exciting new career paths. Understand the main components of distributed ledgers and blockchains. With the rise of the digital economy, it’s no surprise that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are growing in popularity. This three-week course from King’s College London and Quant Network will empower you with an understanding of how blockchains and distributed ledgers work as well as their advantages over centralised ledgers.

Enroll in course

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Once you’ve completed this course, you will have the foundational knowledge that you need to become a blockchain developer.

Be introduced to cryptocurrencies

There are thousands of cryptocurrencies in existence. On this course, you will learn how to develop programs to send and receive payments for BTC, ETH, and XRP.

Importantly, you will also learn about the groundbreaking distributed ledger technology that these cryptocurrencies are built on.

Learn how to build programs that interact with distributed ledger technology

Applications built on distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are more transparent, promote decentralised control, and are more resilient to software crashes as well as malicious actors.

On this course, you’ll gain the skills needed to create your own applications and programs that can interact with and be built on DLTs.

Study with the specialists at King’s College London and Quant Network

The King’s College Department of Informatics has a long-established leadership in the Distributed Artificial Intelligence domain, which is closely related to blockchain.

Coupled with the DLT know-how of Quant Network, these experts are the perfect guides to help you become a blockchain developer.

Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction to Distributed Ledger Technologies

Week 2: Distributed Ledger Technology Data Structures

Week 3: Cryptography in Distributed Ledger Technologies

Learning on this course

You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Demonstrate an understanding on what is a ledger and what advantages ledgers implemented in a distributed manner have over ledgers implemented in a centralised manner.

- Develop knowledge of the main components of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies

- Code your first programs utilising blockchain technologies

- Identify the differences between the two main distributed ledger technology asset tracking models, the first being the unspent transaction ouput (UTXO) model, and the second being the accounts model

- Investigate the different uses of cryptography in distributed ledger technologies

- Design blockchain applications that use Quant's Overledger API Gateway
Who is the course for?

This course is designed for computer scientists or software engineers who would like to explore avenues in blockchain and distributed ledger technology that could lead to new opportunities.