International School on Algorand Smart Contracts

Algorand has several distinctive features that make it different from other mainstream blockchain platforms: for instance, the instant transaction finality, the native custom assets, the atomic groups of transactions, the separation between stateless to stateful smart contracts, the concept of local variables, and the TEAL bytecode language. All these features can be combined to design complex smart contracts, that can be executed on-chain by the Algorand Virtual Machine.

The International School on Algorand Smart Contracts aims at giving a comprehensive understanding on the development of smart contracts for the Algorand blockchain. The school is organized by leading scientists in the area of blockchain technologies, and it is open to international MSc/PhD students, researchers and practitioners from academia and industry.

The school programme combines theoretical lectures with the practical sessions, and includes a 1-week project development work, with awards for the best projects.

Important dates

Participation

The school will be hosted online. All sessions will be held in English.

The school plans for a maximum of 30 regular attendees; the attendance to the school is free. The participants will be selected by the scientific committee on a CV best-match basis.

Besides regular attendees, we also admit a number of listeners, who can attend the school synchronously or asynchronously. Unlike regular students, listeners will not participate in the development work, and therefore will not receive technical support and will not be eligible for the project awards. Asynchronous attendance will be possible only through resources that speakers will share in the school website (e.g., slides, recorded lectures, code snippets).

Registration link: https://forms.gle/LHNoCVaNx2aBhu7z8

Twitter handle: Twitter URL

School programme

All times are GMT+2 (CEST)

September 27, 2022

15.00-15.30. Presentation of the school

The school organizers

15.30-19.00. Blockchain consensus mechanisms

Ivan Visconti, University of Salerno, Italy

[ slides video ]

September 29, 2022

15.00-16.30. Algorand transactions and smart signatures

Massimo Bartoletti, University of Cagliari, Italy and Roberto Zunino, University of Trento, Italy

[ slides video ]

16.45-17.45. Introduction to Algorand smart contracts

Cosimo Bassi, Algorand Labs

[ slides from page 80 video ]

18.00-19.00. Description of project requirements & evaluation criteria

Andrea Vitaletti, Sapienza University of Rome

[ slides ]

October 4, 2022

15.00-16.15. Programming contracts in pyTEAL: PyTEAL Basics

Matteo Almanza, Algorand Labs

[ slides from page 157 video ]

16.15-17.30. Programming contracts in pyTEAL: Algorand ABI

Stefano De Angelis, Algorand Labs

[ slides from page 188 video ]

17.45-19.00. Programming contracts in Beaker

Chris Kim, Algorand Inc.

[ slides from page 219 video ]

October 6, 2022

15.00-17.45. Smart contracts development Lab in pyTEAL

Marco Zecchini, Sapienza University of Rome

[ video ]

18.00-19.00. Q&A on project development

In this week students will start the project for the development of a PoC exploiting Algorand.

October 10 - 17, 2022

Project development and mentoring

This week has no lectures; rather, the week will be devoted to the development of the project by the school participants, which will work asynchronously. Each group will receive mentoring from the school organizers and technical support from the lab tutors.

October 18, 2022

15.00-16.00. Best Practices round table

Ryan Terribilini, Head of Ecosystem Funding, Algorand Foundation (moderator)

John Clarke, AlgoFi

Fergal Walsh, Tinyman

Giuseppe Palazzolo, Folks Finance

Austen Probst, AlgoSeas

16.00-18.30. Project presentations

19.00-19.30. Closing & project awards

Developers’ projects & awards

In the second week a project on smart contract programming will be assigned to the school participants. Participants will be grouped by the school organizers according to their background and expertise. The groups, composed of 3 students each, will work on the projects offline during the rest of the second and third weeks, also interacting with the school organizers and with the lab tutors. The developed projects will be presented in the last week and will be evaluated by an evaluation committee.

After the school, participants will submit the code of projects to the Algorand Developers Portal, in the form of articles including an overview of the solution, code snippets, and the link to the full code. Awards will be granted once projects are submitted to the Algorand Developers Portal.

The best three projects will be awarded at the school closing. The amounts of the awards are the following (before taxes):

Organising committee

For additional information, please contact the organization chair: bart@unica.it

Acknowledgements

The school is organized thanks to the economic and organizing support of the Algorand Foundation and to the support of the Italian Working Group on Distributed Ledger Technology.