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EVM through CTFs

A fun EVM guide

The first 2 CTFs are live!

Learn EVM by solving a set of CTFs below. The CTFs are not meant to be an optimization problem, they are just meant to teach you EVM.

The challenges may seem like magic for those who don’t know EVM yet. But once you understand it, CTFs become pretty straightforward.

The prerequisites required for each CTF are in the CTF description, so you will never have to do lots of digging around on Google.

Escape @zachxbt and @samczsun

Bend Ethereum bytecode to your will

The CTF that will make you write Yul and Huff

What types of flows consume the most gas?

Interesting CREATE2 use cases

Grokking proxies & clones using just 2 opcodes

Understanding the "why" of various gas optimizations

Reverse engineer a profitable MEV strategy

Using contracts to store data efficiently

How it works

I am running EVMthroughCTFs via an experimental format meant to align my and your incentives. Here is how it works:

The guide costs 0.03 ETH. You lock in 2x of that amount (0.06 ETH) in a contract. No one has access to those funds. They are locked. The extra amount that you lock in is the "motivation deposit".

Each solved CTF will unlock a portion of those funds. For example, you unlock 33% of the funds after you solve the first CTF, and 66% after you solve the second. The unlocked funds are split 50/50 among you (the student) and me (the teacher).

The idea is that, after you solve all the CTFs, all funds will be unlocked. I will get my reward for creating these CTFs and you will get your "motivation deposit" (equal to the guide's price) back.

Our incentives are aligned. You're incentivized to complete all the CTFs to get your deposit back. And I'm incentivized to teach you how to solve all CTFs correctly so that my reward is also unlocked.

But be careful! You have 12 weeks to finish the challenges. If you don't finish on time, I can steal everything that you have locked at that point in the contract!

Since the guide is still under development, it's heavily discounted. The final cost, when all CTFs are ready, will be around 0.1 ETH (3x the price). For limited time, you can enter the guide for 0.03 ETH (by locking in 0.06 ETH).

Purchasing now will get you access to all future CTFs as well.

After you purchase the guide, you will get access to Discord. I will also hold office hours ~3 times a week where you can get help about the CTFs or EVM in general.

Details

In the name of transparency, here is the contract that will hold the funds (it's deployed on mainnet at 0xAA6E96f553CBa1566F30AC50674b84be56Fc5AFe):

This is v2 of the contract. v1 is deployed here. v1 no longer accepts new entries but everyone who entered the challenge as part of v1 is grandfathered into v2.

In order to get your motivation deposit back, you need to solve on-chain CTFs. You can call the getAllCTFs function to get info about the CTFs. Here is the current state:

CTF #1: {ctfContract: 0x53A071E...bfC5a74, weight: 1}
CTF #2: {ctfContract: 0x13650e7...D1E59a5, weight: 2}

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