RedDuck Academy

An open-source, developer-first blockchain academy.
Learn to build on Ethereum and Solana by writing and shipping real code.

Live academy  ·  Contribute a lesson  ·  RedDuck

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What this is

RedDuck Academy is a hands-on curriculum for developers who want to build on blockchains, not just read about them. It has three tracks:

• Blockchain basics — how blockchains actually work, taught Bitcoin-first and comparative, and readable even by non-engineers.
• Development on Ethereum — Solidity from first principles through security, proxies, token standards, and the patterns behind real DeFi protocols.
• Development on Solana — Rust and the Solana account model, up to shipping your own on-chain program.

Every track is built around writing code and milestone projects, not slides. The lessons live in this repo as plain Markdown, and the live site renders them at academy.redduck.io.

The lectures are open source

The lecture content in content/ is open to everyone. Spotted a typo, an unclear explanation, or something out of date? Fix it with a pull request — no need to run the app or a database. You edit a Markdown file, open a PR, and once it's merged the site rebuilds with your change.

➡️ How to contribute a lesson

Why RedDuck built this

RedDuck is a blockchain development and consulting firm that has been shipping Web3 products since 2020 — EVM chains, smart contracts, and full-stack apps across Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, and more. This academy began as our internal onboarding curriculum: the path we use to bring engineers up to speed on blockchain development, kept current with the practices we actually rely on in production.

We're opening it up because solid, honest, developer-first blockchain education is still hard to find, and the best way to keep a curriculum sharp is to let the people learning from it make it better. It reflects how we work: we never build what we don't believe in.

Running it yourself

The academy is a monorepo — apps/web (Cloudflare Workers), apps/backend (Heroku), apps/admin (Payload CMS on Vercel), and one PostgreSQL database. To run the full stack locally or self-host your own copy, see:

➡️ docs/self-hosting.md

Contributing lecture content needs none of this — just the guide above.

License

RedDuck Academy is split in two:

• Platform code — everything outside content/ — is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE. Fork it, adapt it, deploy it.
• Lecture content — the Markdown under content/ — is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). See content/LICENSE. You may reuse and adapt it with attribution to RedDuck Academy, as long as you keep derivatives under the same license.