The students will learn the fundamental design principles and properties of Blockchain-based systems, as well as their application principles and patterns. From the point of view of applications, a) creation and integration of general-purpose business capabilities and b) Cyber-Physical System (CPS) use cases receive a strong emphasis. The course underpins its core messages with the introduction, discussion and showcasing of specific technologies.

1. Introduction. Core concepts of blockchain systems, key motivating factors by sector, phases of evolution. "The blockchain revolution"; known and planned applications and their transformative effects.

2. Bitcoin, the first "blockchain" technology. The motivation for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, introduction to its operating principles. Proof of Work (PoW) consensus and its properties. Specialized mining: clusters, GPU and ASIC-based approaches.

3. Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. Usage, wallets, the Bitcoin market. Regulatory environment. Bitcoin-style alternative currencies ("altcoins").

4. Visualization and analysis of blockchains. Key patterns of visualization and analysis. Visual discovery of transaction patterns.

5. Smart contracts over blockchains. The Ethereum technology; the main network; smart contract support. Programming model, example smart contracts. Smart contract weaknesses and vulnerabilities, formal approaches to smart contract validation and verification.

6. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Permissioned-consensus blockchains and closed-network blockchains. "Business to business" and "shared ledger" application patterns. An introduction of the Hyperledger project of the Linux Foundation. In-depth introduction of the Hyperledger Fabric platform. Non-blockchain DLTs: an overview of the CORDA platform.

7. Implementation examples. Design and implementation of Solidity smart contracts. Smart contract (“chaincode”) development for Hyperledger Fabric.

8. Beyond Proof of Work. The distributed consensus problem. Consensus protocols and their properties. Protocols replacing Proof-of-Work in various blockchain platforms and their rationale. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), Proof of Stake (PoS, Ethereum) and Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET, Hyperledger Sawtooth).

9. Performance analysis of blockchain systems. Motivation; Quality of Service (QoS) aspects and metrics of blockchain systems. Empirical identification of bottlenecks using visual exploratory and statistical analysis; worked-out example: Hyperledger Fabric.

10. Blockchain-based business processes. Specification and execution of business processes over blockchain platforms, using smart contracts. Monitoring, log-based compliance validation. Case study: smart contract-based execution of business patterns captured in the BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) language.

11. Blockchain technologies in governance and public services. Standardization efforts.

12. Convergence of Cyber-Physical Systems and blockchain. Challenges in storing, processing and accessing sensor data. Sensor- and data fusion in smart contracts. Technologies and applications, "in-field" blockchains.