Decoded
Money and crypto, explained from zero.
Most explanations of crypto start three steps ahead of where you are. Decoded starts before the beginning, with a question almost nobody asks out loud: what is money, actually? From there, every lesson answers the question the last one raised, one plain idea at a time, until blockchains, wallets, and the headlines all make sense. The only goal is that you genuinely understand it.
Educational series. Not financial or investment advice. No jargon assumed. Ten lessons, three acts.By the end, you can…
Narrated, not read
A voice walks you through each idea while the picture draws itself. Captions stay in sync. Listen, read, or both, at your own pace.
Checks that adapt
One small question every few minutes. Get it and move on. Miss it and the lesson pauses to explain that idea a different way. Nothing is graded, nothing is timed.
Try everything yourself
Every lesson ends in a lab where you do the thing: run a favour economy, tamper with a ledger, race a bank wire. Watching is not understanding.
The problem
Why money needs fixing at allWhat is money, really?
Why does a piece of paper, or a number on a screen, buy lunch? Forget crypto entirely for ten minutes. Once you see what money actually is, everything that follows becomes obvious.
Start lesson 1From Lesson 2, your email saves your progress. The series remembers your understanding meter and what you found tricky, and picks up exactly where you left off, on any device. No spam, and lesson one asks for nothing.
The ledger behind everything
What actually happens in the four seconds after you tap your card? A relay through six books you have never seen, watched in slow motion. Nothing moves. Everything updates.
Start lesson 2The trust question
Every book has a keeper, and every keeper holds five specific powers, each with two faces. The point is not suspicion, it is precision: know exactly what you are trusting.
Start lesson 3The invention
The ledger that keeps itselfThe shared record
Strike the keeper, keep the book. Thousands of identical copies, add-only history, and a network that ignores liars. The three ideas everything else is built on.
Preview lesson 4How strangers agree
Thousands of computers that do not trust each other end up with identical books. The secret is making dishonesty expensive, and you get to try to break it.
Start lesson 5Why the network has its own money
The coin pays the keepers, prices the ledger's space, and arms the fence. Fire a junk cannon at a fee-less ledger and watch why fees exist.
Start lesson 6Living with it
From understanding to competenceKeys, wallets, and custody
Coins never leave the ledger; wallets hold keys, and keys are ownership. Create a fully simulated wallet and drill the handling instincts safely.
Start lesson 7Moving value across the world
Toronto to Manila on two rails, then the move that makes it yours: a full exchange-to-wallet withdrawal, rehearsed with the professional habits.
Start lesson 8Where it goes wrong
No undo, no fraud department, and that is survivable: the five real loss patterns, the scam anatomy, and three live drills from documented scripts.
Start lesson 9The whole picture
No new material. Assemble the entire story in ten pieces, watch the thread close, and walk out able to explain all of it to anyone.
Start lesson 10Drive three real networks
Three short runs on live testnets · before the examYou have taken the machine apart for ten lessons. Now you drive one. Each run puts you on a real public testnet, the network's own software and validators, on tokens worth nothing, to make a wallet, send a payment, and mint an NFT, then prove each one on chain. Same three jobs, three networks, so the shape becomes yours and not one chain's accident. All three are free, and finishing them is what opens the exam.
XRPL, hands on
Spin up a wallet on the XRP Ledger Testnet, take the faucet, send a live payment, and mint an NFT. Paste what you did and we read the ledger to confirm it.
Start the XRPL runEthereum, hands on
The same three jobs in Ethereum's dialect: a wallet made in the page, a transaction that pays real gas, and a small ERC-721 contract you deploy yourself.
Start the Ethereum runSolana, hands on
The third dialect: a wallet made in the page, a payment that confirms in under a second, and a token of one minted by the program every Solana token uses. Finish this and the exam opens.
Start the Solana runThe exam
Prove it stuck, any timeWhere the path goes next
Coming soon, as we buildRead the machinery
Eight lectures · the credential unlocks themNow that you know what the machine is, learn to read a real one yourself. Each lecture opens a public artifact, an explorer, a real block, an attestation, a wallet prompt, and decodes it, ending in a lab where you do the reading. Unlock the series for $4.99 one time, or free with the credential you earn by passing the Decoded exam. Finish all eight and you earn the Intermediate credential, which unlocks a graduate discount on everything paid here: the Advanced series and a Review or Estate Kit.
Reading a Real Explorer
Open a public explorer and read any payment cold: amount, fee, from, to, state. The lab hands you a live validated ledger.
One Block Anatomized
Take real Bitcoin block 800,000 apart, header to coinbase, then tamper one transaction and watch the fingerprints cascade.
The Settlement Day
Run one business day across four settlement rails and see who is exposed to whom between the cutoffs.
Fees, Congestion, and Priority
Bid in the fee auction with three real urgencies, and learn why a stuck payment is never a lost one.
Stablecoins Under the Hood
Read a reserve attestation with a red pen, then let a weekend redemption run test the sort you made.
Custody Operations
Design custody for a household, name its single points of failure, then let a year of bad luck attack it.
Smart Contracts, Plainly
Read five approval prompts, sign only what the job needs, then watch the ones you left open drain a sim wallet.
Your Records and the CRA
Keep a four-column book across a year of events, and learn exactly where a reference stops and a CPA begins.
Specialize
Three tracks, coming as we buildWhat the institutions built
The Spot ETF · Tokenized Funds and the DTCC · Institutional Rails. For advisors, allocators, and business owners.
How it holds together
The Consensus Families · Cryptography That Carries It. For builders and the technically curious.
Privacy, compliance, regulators
Privacy, Surveillance, and Compliance · The Regulatory Map for Canada. All three tracks converge at the Capstone Brief.
When the tracks open, your Intermediate credential takes a graduate discount off here and on a Review or Estate Kit.