Cardano Academy

The catalog of the Cardano Academy holds more than a dozen courses, from a 30-minute module on staking rewards to the eight-hour professional certification course. All of them run online at the pace of the learner, and registration on the Academy learning platform costs nothing. The Cardano Foundation also publishes the course materials as open source on GitHub.

Beginners usually start with Blockchain Fundamentals, five modules of about 90 minutes on how distributed ledgers work. The Cardano Blockchain Certified Associate (CBCA) course follows with 26 units in under four hours on cryptography, consensus from proof of work to the Ouroboros protocols, the extended UTXO model and scaling with Hydra, Mithril, Peras and Leios. The course also explains the post-quantum standards that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology published in 2024.

The Cardano Foundation issues two certifications, and the testing provider Pearson VUE runs both exams. The CBCA exam costs 99 US dollars per sitting, is offered in English and Portuguese and may be repeated without limit after a failed attempt. The free CBCA course is the recommended preparation, but candidates can book the exam without it.

The Cardano Blockchain Certified Professional (CBCP) builds on the associate level and covers seven domains, among them governance, eUTXO development, decentralized identity, open source and the calculation of staking rewards. Its exam uses scenario questions, runs online or at a test center and leads to a certificate valid for three years. Completed courses and passed exams also earn digital badges on Credly, which follow the Open Badge standard and can be shown on LinkedIn or in a resume.

Two courses explain on-chain governance under CIP-1694, in which delegated representatives (DReps), stake pool operators and the Constitutional Committee vote on changes to the network. An Introduction to Cardano Governance covers these roles and tools such as GovTool, Ekklesia and the Catalyst Voting App in ten modules of about 90 minutes. In the 23 short modules of Cardano Governance: Applied, learners register as a DRep, draft a proposal and cast a vote with GovTool on the Preview test network.

Developers learn to write smart contracts for the extended UTXO model in the Aiken course, ten modules of about four hours, without first learning the Haskell language. Agentic Coding on Cardano teaches a newer workflow in 16 units and 63 short videos, in which an AI coding agent writes the validator code from a written specification. Learners then check that code against a published list of 26 vulnerabilities before anything goes live.

Each step of the agentic course ends with a real transaction on the pre-production network, from a predicted fee and a stake delegation to a minted token and a governance vote. Participants finish with a working application, an on-chain portfolio of seven era stamps and a verifiable course credential.

The business courses are short and focus on use cases in finance and public administration. The case study on real-world assets follows a regulated tokenization platform on Cardano from the physical asset through insured custody to a tradable digital twin in three modules. It is written for innovation and finance leaders who need to judge how tokenization changes the liquidity and compliance of physical assets.

Two identity courses explain verifiable credentials, the Veridian platform and the KERI protocol in up to 18 units. They include the verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI), the ISO-standardized digital form of the identifier that companies already use in financial transactions. A further case study shows how blockchain records make the decisions of AI agents verifiable, and a 19-module course explains how companies use open-source software.

For organizations, the Academy offers three formats: one-to-one advisory for executives, instructor-led masterclasses for leadership teams and on-demand e-learning for employees. The Brazilian energy company Petrobras brings Academy content into workshops for its employees. The Academy also works with public bodies such as the province of Entre Ríos in Argentina and the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional in Buenos Aires.

The course Cardano Fundamentals is also available free of charge on Binance Academy, which counted 44 million users when the course launched. It takes about three hours and covers the origins of Cardano, the Ouroboros protocol, scaling, governance and business use cases.

In a multi-year partnership with the Venture Accelerator at UCLA Anderson School of Management, Academy content becomes part of blockchain teaching at UCLA from 2027 on. Students who complete the opening masterclass receive a certification sponsored by the Cardano Foundation, and five Cardano Fellowships support early-stage companies in the accelerator.