Prerequisite: Minimum grade of C- in CMSC330 and CMSC351

Topics include blockchains ranging from fundamentals like consensus, to privacy-preserving payments, smart contracts, and decentralized finance(DeFi). The course will also cover recent developments in applied cryptography that are in increasing industrial usage such as zero-knowledge proofs and a small amount on multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption. It will look at what it takes to take these technologies from academic theory to real-world usage.