RareSkills

RareSkills is an advanced blockchain engineering education platform built on a single conviction: that the Web3 ecosystem suffers not from a shortage of introductory tutorials but from a shortage of rigorous, deeply technical instruction. Founded in September 2022 by Jeffrey Scholz, the platform has grown into one of the most respected technical education resources in the Solana and Ethereum developer communities, offering both free self-paced learning and intensive live bootcamps.

Founder and Philosophy

Jeffrey Scholz came to blockchain education from a background in machine learning infrastructure. Before founding RareSkills, he was the youngest senior engineering manager at Yahoo, where he built the company's video machine learning engineering team from scratch. He holds a Master's degree in computational theory from Columbia University. That combination of systems-level engineering experience and academic rigor shapes everything RareSkills produces.

The platform's stated philosophy is to teach "principles and problem-solving skills that underpin blockchain technology, instead of fleeting tools." In practice, this means courses that go several layers deeper than most competitors. A lesson on Solana program development is as likely to cover sBPF assembly as it is to explain a framework API. A DeFi course is built around the mathematical models underneath Uniswap and Compound rather than around clicking through a front end.

Free Resources and the Solana Curriculum

A substantial portion of RareSkills' output is freely available with no login or email required. The platform publishes extensively researched long-form blog articles, interactive coding exercises, and full-length books covering zero-knowledge cryptography, Uniswap V2 and V3, and Solana development.

The flagship free Solana resource is 60 Days of Solana, launched in February 2024 with support from a Solana Foundation grant. The course targets engineers who already know Ethereum or EVM development at a beginner-to-intermediate level and want to transition into Solana program development. Rather than starting from scratch, it maps familiar Ethereum concepts directly onto their Solana equivalents — teaching the architectural differences between account models, the differences in how storage and tokens work, and how the Anchor framework compares to Solidity development patterns.

The curriculum spans eight modules, beginning with Anchor basics and essential Rust syntax for Solidity developers, then progressing through system-level Solana concepts (clocks, sysvars, compute units), the complex account and storage model, SPL token development, advanced design patterns, native Solana programs written in pure Rust, and finally Solana Assembly (sBPF). The progression is deliberate: the course engineers early wins on familiar ground before introducing Solana's genuinely unfamiliar architecture.

Beyond the 60-day structured path, RareSkills maintains a dedicated Solana content category on its blog covering low-level topics that few other educational outlets address — sBPF virtual machine instruction sets, memory layout and register conventions, instruction serialization formats, compute cost analysis, and Rust-to-SBF compilation internals. This depth of coverage has made RareSkills a reference point for Solana engineers who need to go below the framework level.

Bootcamps

RareSkills runs a portfolio of live, cohort-based bootcamps for engineers who want structured accountability alongside the depth the platform is known for:

Advanced Solidity + DeFi Bootcamp (13 weeks) — led by Jeffrey Scholz, this program builds the mathematical and analytical frameworks behind protocols like Compound and Uniswap. It is designed for working engineers who want to move from competent Solidity developers to the level required by audit and protocol engineering roles.

ZK Bootcamp (14 weeks) — taught by instructor João Paulo Morais, the program takes students from first principles through implementing zero-knowledge proof systems including Groth16 and Pinocchio. It is one of the more demanding ZK curricula publicly available.

Rust Bootcamp (3 weeks) — a focused Rust fundamentals program taught by Daniel Cumming, designed as a fast on-ramp for engineers entering Solana development or systems programming.

Uniswap V3 Bootcamp (12 weeks) — a deep technical study of concentrated liquidity mechanics in Uniswap V3, led by João Paulo Morais. The protocol manages over $2.5 billion in TVL, making precise understanding of its mechanics professionally valuable.

Circom Bootcamp (7 weeks) — taught by Jeffrey Scholz, covering the Circom domain-specific language for building ZK circuit applications.

Invariant Testing Bootcamp (5 weeks) — led by instructor Alex The Entreprenerd, focused on stateful fuzzing for smart contract security, taking engineers from zero experience to production-level invariant testing capability.

Active cohorts for most programs are scheduled into late 2026, confirming the platform is operating and actively enrolling students.

Industry Reach and Impact

Engineers from a wide cross-section of the industry's leading organizations have studied through RareSkills, including teams from Lido, Alchemy, Cantina, Circle, the Ethereum Foundation, Coinbase, Consensys, OpenZeppelin, Chainlink Labs, and Polygon. The platform has a formal partnership with OpenZeppelin, the most widely used smart contract library in the Ethereum ecosystem and a major smart contract audit firm.

RareSkills estimates that graduates and users of its audit-focused content have collectively protected more than $3 billion in total value locked across smart contracts, with more than $20 million in funds saved from vulnerabilities identified in 2025.

The RareSkills ZK Book, offered free of charge with no registration, has become one of the primary reference texts for engineers entering the zero-knowledge field. Its combination of theoretical rigor and practical implementation guidance has driven the book's circulation well beyond the enrolled student population.

RareSkills also hosts RareWeek, a concentrated week-long deep technical study program, for students who prefer intensive formats over semester-style bootcamps.

RareSkills and the Solana Ecosystem

Solana's developer ecosystem grew faster than any other blockchain ecosystem in 2024, a period during which RareSkills' 60 Days of Solana was one of the primary free onboarding resources for engineers making the transition from Ethereum. The course filled a specific and underserved need: EVM developers with real skills who needed a technically honest comparison of the two execution environments, not a beginner's guide to wallets and keypairs.

The combination of free foundational content — accessible to any developer globally without payment or registration — and live bootcamps for engineers who need credentialed, instructor-led depth positions RareSkills distinctively in the blockchain education landscape. Most educational platforms choose one model. RareSkills runs both, with the free content serving as the proof of the platform's technical standards and the bootcamps providing the structure that production-level skill acquisition often requires.

For Solana developers specifically, RareSkills represents one of the most technically serious free educational resources available, maintained by instructors with auditing and engineering backgrounds who write from production experience rather than from curriculum templates.