RareSkills

RareSkills is a blockchain engineering education platform founded by Jeffrey Scholz, a former Yahoo senior engineering manager who holds a graduate degree in computational theory from Columbia University. The platform operates from the premise that most blockchain education is too shallow — teaching developers to use tools without building the mathematical and architectural intuition needed to design production-grade systems. RareSkills addresses that gap through cohort-based bootcamps capped at five students per month and a substantial library of free technical resources that require no account or email to access.

Founder and Philosophy

Jeffrey Scholz built RareSkills after observing a persistent mismatch in Web3 hiring: developers who could follow tutorials but struggled to reason through novel DeFi mechanics, ZK circuit design, or gas-critical contract architecture. His instructional approach centers on active recall and mastery-based pacing rather than passive video consumption. Bootcamp cohorts participate in live structured discussions rather than recorded lectures, receive weekly one-on-one mentoring from expert instructors, and complete mathematical derivations and programming exercises designed to prove comprehension through explanation — not recognition. If a cohort needs additional time on a topic, remediation weeks are added rather than advancing on schedule.

Scholz is a two-time bestseller on Udemy and has become one of the more prominent educators in the ZK proof space, running a widely-read Twitter account and publishing technical threads on polynomial mathematics, elliptic curves, and proof system implementation.

Bootcamp Curriculum

RareSkills offers six cohort-based programs, each with an entrance exam requirement and structured to assume coding fluency from day one.

The Advanced Solidity + DeFi Bootcamp runs for 13 weeks and walks students through the mathematical foundations of live DeFi protocols. The curriculum progresses from cross-contract interactions and ERC-20 safety patterns through fixed-point arithmetic, vault mechanics with protocol fees, and a from-scratch lending protocol build. Students then conduct deep dives into Morpho, Compound V2, and Uniswap V2 — analyzing how these systems work, why they are designed as they are, and where the risk surfaces lie. The instructor is Scholz.

The ZK Bootcamp runs for 14 weeks and is the only cohort-based program in the space that teaches students to implement Groth16 and Pinocchio ZK-SNARK algorithms from scratch without AI assistance. The curriculum covers Rank 1 Constraint Systems, Quadratic Arithmetic Programs, modular arithmetic, abstract algebra, elliptic curves, pairings, polynomial commitment schemes, and trusted setups. Prerequisites include programming experience, algebra comfort, and prior linear algebra exposure. The program totals roughly 270 miniature challenges distributed across 100 days of study.

The Uniswap V3 Bootcamp is a 12-week course examining the concentrated liquidity model underpinning a protocol with over $2.5 billion in TVL at time of writing. The Circom Bootcamp focuses on ZK circuit applications using the Circom domain-specific language. The Invariant Testing Bootcamp, taught by Alex The Entreprenerd, covers stateful fuzzing techniques for smart contract security over five weeks. A three-week Rust Bootcamp rounds out the catalog for developers entering Rust-dependent ecosystems.

Free Resources

RareSkills publishes a significant volume of free technical material. The RareSkills ZK Book is the platform's most widely cited resource: a full-length, free e-book covering zero-knowledge proof theory and implementation from first principles, requiring no login or payment to access. The book includes a second part on Bulletproofs for inner product arguments, a proof system with distinct performance and trust characteristics from the SNARKs covered in Part 1. The ZK Book has been referenced by security researchers and protocol engineers as a rare readable treatment of the underlying mathematics.

The blog organizes content into Circom, Solana development, Solidity, and zero-knowledge categories. Articles cover topics including the Number Theoretic Transform, proxy and upgradeability patterns, Uniswap V2 and V3 mechanics, Compound Finance internals, and Starknet Cairo development. The technical depth is consistently expert-level, with mathematical proofs, algorithm traces, and architectural analysis rather than introductory walkthroughs.

On GitHub, the RareSkills organization maintains 35 repositories used as learning materials. The most-starred are gas-puzzles (491 stars), a sequence of smart contracts for practicing gas optimization; solidity-riddles (422 stars), a set of security exercises testing knowledge of Solidity's less-documented behaviors; huff-puzzles (414 stars), EVM bytecode exercises using the Huff language; and zero-knowledge-puzzles (344 stars), Circom exercises for building EVM-compatible ZK programs. The organization also maintains vertigo-rs, a mutation testing tool for Foundry-based Ethereum contract development.

RareCode, a companion platform, hosts over 700 Rust exercises for self-directed practice outside the formal bootcamp.

Solana Coverage

RareSkills covers Solana development as a distinct blog category, producing technical content on Solana program architecture and developer tooling. The platform's cryptographic education — particularly around zero-knowledge proofs — is directly relevant to Solana's growing ZK-program ecosystem. RareSkills has been credited as a contributor to Solana's developer growth trajectory, with its public ZK materials helping onboard cryptography-focused engineers to the ecosystem.

Alumni Placement and RareTalent

Graduates of RareSkills bootcamps have landed positions at the Ethereum Foundation, Chainlink, OpenZeppelin, Coinbase, and major DeFi protocols. Alumni report salary increases up to an order of magnitude, and at least one graduate secured a Coinbase role through a referral from a fellow cohort member before the program ended. RareTalent, the platform's job placement arm, connects bootcamp alumni directly with Web3 employers seeking engineers with demonstrated on-chain and cryptographic skills.

The selective format — five students per monthly cohort, mandatory entrance exam, weekly one-on-one coaching — is designed to produce a small, high-quality alumni network rather than maximizing enrollment. Course Report reviewers give the program a perfect 5.0 average across posted alumni reviews, with recurring themes around demanding workload, rigorous content, and high-quality instructor access.

RareSkills does not position itself as an on-ramp for developers new to programming. Its programs assume professional code fluency, and the entrance exam filters accordingly. The platform's target student is a working developer who wants to move from building with protocols to understanding and auditing them at the implementation level.