Zealynx Academy Is Public: Build, Audit, and Launch Web3 Protocols

After six weeks of private use by 44 early builders, the platform we wished existed is now open to everyone.

TL;DR — Quick Summary

Zealynx Academy is public today at academy.zealynx.io, free to use, no paywall.
Built for Web3 founders who want to ship secure protocols and grow them into real businesses. Also useful for anyone learning to build on-chain the right way.
Four connected pillars: (1) rebuild real protocols like Uniswap V2 from scratch, (2) shadow-audit past security contests on real forks, (3) build your own AI auditor agent, (4) learn the non-code side of launching in the eMBA for Web3 Founders.
Gamified by design: 7 ranks (newcomer → sovereign), public leaderboard, Lynx earned by real work.
We joined the Giveth Ethereum Security QF round backed by TheDAO Security Fund's 500 ETH matching pool. A $5 donation from a new supporter compounds more than$ 500 from one. See: Quadratic Funding Explained.
Carlos Vendrell was recognized by TheDAO Fund with the ETHSecurity Badge for contribution and expertise in the Ethereum Security ecosystem.
44 early builders used the private version since late March. 3 have completed the full Uniswap V2 rebuild. The platform is now open to anyone.

Why We Built It

After 30+ smart contract audits at Zealynx Security, the same patterns kept showing up, audit after audit:

Builders forking code they did not fully understand. They would clone Uniswap V2, change a few lines, deploy, and assume the rest of the code "just worked." It did not. Forks carry inherited bugs, subtle design decisions that no longer apply, and attack surfaces the original team spent years hardening. A fork is not a shortcut. A fork is a contract you did not design, running on top of a design you did not write.
Technical founders who could build but could not launch. They shipped beautiful code. Then tokenomics went wrong. Or governance was captured. Or they blew the treasury in six months because no one had taught them treasury management. Or regulators came calling and they had no legal framework. The protocol broke for reasons unrelated to the code.
AI teams shipping security tools that missed basic bugs. As AI auditors entered the market, we saw companies pay real money for tools that could not catch reentrancy, miscategorized severity, or hallucinated vulnerabilities that did not exist. Building an AI that audits smart contracts well is hard. Most of them are not there yet.

We built Zealynx Academy to fix all three.

What Zealynx Academy Is

Zealynx Academy is a free, interactive education platform for Web3 builders and founders. It is not a video course. It is not a library of documentation. It is a path — a structured sequence where you build, break, and launch real systems, with verifiable tests confirming you actually understood what you did.

Every part of the platform is designed around one philosophy: you learn by doing, not by watching. No lecture-style videos. No passive reading material. Every section asks you to write code, find bugs, or make design decisions. The platform tells you whether you got it right.

The Four Pillars

The Academy is organized around four connected pillars that map to what Web3 founders actually need to know.

Pillar 1: The Build

"You don't learn a protocol by watching videos about it. You learn it by building it yourself."

You pick a production protocol. The first module is Uniswap V2, a minimal but complete automated market maker. You rebuild it from scratch, guided, line by line, until your code matches the original.

How It Works

Starter code gives you the scaffolding. Imports, storage layout, function signatures, interface stubs.
Your job is the function bodies. The swap math. The fee calculation. The LP token minting and burning. The K invariant check. TODO comments and hints guide you, but the thinking is yours.
Automated tests verify your implementation. Not toy tests — the actual test suite that checks for fee-adjusted K invariants, reentrancy guards, flash swap callbacks, and fee-on-transfer token edge cases.
You finish the module when all 207 tests pass.

Two builders have already completed the full Uniswap V2 rebuild. One did it twice to prove it was not luck.

Why Build From Scratch?

The point is not to teach Solidity syntax. If you want to learn Solidity, Cyfrin Updraft and CryptoZombies are excellent for that. The point is to understand what you are about to fork.

If you rebuild Uniswap V2 yourself, you understand exactly:

What the reserves are and why they matter
Why the constant product formula works
How the flash swap callback creates composability (and attack surface)
What you have in the codebase, what you want to keep, what you want to change, what you want to throw out

That is what forking with awareness looks like. You are no longer copying a black box. You are modifying a system you actually understand.

What's Live and What's Coming

Uniswap V2 — 8 sections, 207 automated tests. Live.
Compound V2 — 18 sections, lending protocol from scratch. In production, sections rolling out.
Uniswap V3 — concentrated liquidity math. Coming.
Additional modules for lending, vaults, bridges, stablecoins — on the roadmap.

Pillar 2: The Security Training (Shadow Arena)

Once you have built a protocol, you do not ship it. You shadow-audit a past security contest on a real fork of the same protocol family.

How It Works

The Shadow Arena has five live targets, each a real protocol that went through a real public audit contest. The findings are already documented. Your job is to rediscover them inside a time-boxed window.

Target	Category	SLOC	Findings	Notes
Basin	DEX/AMM	1,145	14	Ran a $40k public contest
ElasticSwap	DEX/AMM	739	3	Beginner-friendly
Velodrome	DEX/AMM	1,914	13	Advanced, ve(3,3) model
Flux Finance	Lending	4,365	6	Compound V2 fork with KYC
Canto v2	Lending	2,000	10	Compound V2 fork

That is 10,163 lines of real Solidity with 46 documented bugs.

You submit findings during the window. True positives earn Lynx. False positives cost Lynx after your first three. When the window closes, you get the full review: what you found, what you missed, and why each bug mattered.

Why This Matters

You cannot learn security from theory alone. You learn security by confronting real code, under time pressure, hunting for real bugs. The Shadow Arena gives you that environment without the cost of being wrong — because the scoring is against a published answer key.

After doing this on a few protocols, patterns emerge. You start to see the classes of bugs that keep appearing. You start to see them in your own code before you ship. That is what shadow audits build: the security mindset that catches bugs before they cost you a treasury.

Shadow Audits Are a Public Good

The concept of shadow auditing — reviewing already-graded protocols as a training exercise — is how some of the best security researchers in Web3 built their skills. The Shadow Arena systematizes it, removes the friction of finding targets and scoring results, and makes it accessible to anyone willing to put in the work.

Pillar 3: Build Your Own AI Auditor Agent

Most Web3 security teams are now deploying AI auditor agents alongside human reviewers. But the quality bar across tools is uneven. Some are excellent. Some miss reentrancy. Some hallucinate vulnerabilities that do not exist.

Zealynx Academy includes an interactive guide for building your own AI auditor agent from scratch. Not a ChatGPT wrapper. A real agent with a detection strategy, a verification pipeline, and a benchmark you can actually measure.

How It Works

Pick a path. The guide includes multiple paths, each modeled after the most powerful existing AI auditor tools. Different detection strategies, different verification approaches, different trade-offs. You choose based on what you want your agent to be good at.
Build it step by step. The interactive guide walks you through architecture, prompt design, tool integration, and the verification layer that prevents false positives.
Benchmark in the AI Auditor Arena. The Arena has 10 contests configured with 118 real Code4rena findings loaded as ground truth. Your agent runs against the bugs. Your score shows how many it catches, how many it misses, and how many false positives it generates.

If you are a security researcher shipping AI tools, this is how you prove yours actually works. If you are a builder who wants to understand what AI auditors can and cannot do, this is how you see the real capability gap.

Pillar 4: The eMBA for Web3 Founders

Most of us are technical. Launching a protocol is harder than we think.

The eMBA for Web3 Founders is the Academy's business track. It covers everything a technical founder needs to know that no engineering curriculum teaches.

What's Inside

Tokenomics. Design your supply, emissions, and incentives so the token actually aligns the system you built.
Fundraising for Web3. VC vs DAO vs community vs grants. Term sheets. Dilution. Timing.
Governance design. How to avoid governance capture, what on-chain vs off-chain voting actually does, when to use a timelock, when to use a multisig.
Treasury management. Runway planning for protocols, diversification, handling market drawdowns, paying contributors.
Regulatory navigation. Where you can and cannot operate, what securities law means for token launches, legal wrappers (foundations, Cayman entities), realistic compliance paths.
Go-to-market. How Web3 founders actually build early user momentum. What works. What does not.
Security as strategy. Why securing your protocol is a marketing advantage, not a cost center.
Building and leading a protocol team. Remote work, contributor structures, when to outsource, when to hire in-house.
Liquidity bootstrapping. How protocols actually get their first liquidity.

Every module is built from patterns the Zealynx Security audit team has watched play out across 30+ protocol engagements. Good code, bad launches. Great products, captured governance. Sound economics, wrong market entry. The eMBA handles everything we don't know we don't know.

Gamified by Design

"In Web3, your reputation is your resume."

The whole platform is gamified with a specific purpose: turn your learning into a verifiable public track record.

7 Ranks from Newcomer to Sovereign

Your rank progresses as you complete work:

Newcomer — you just joined.
Tinkerer — you've earned your first Lynx through section completion.
Builder — you've completed a full module build.
Deployer — you've shipped in the Shadow Arena and earned trust.
Architect — you've engaged across pillars and demonstrated breadth.
Protocol Engineer — advanced mastery across multiple protocols and the Shadow Arena.
Sovereign — top tier, for builders who have demonstrated end-to-end mastery.

Each rank unlocks more of the platform and signals your skill level to anyone who reads your profile.

Public Leaderboard

Are you audit-ready?

Download the free Pre-Audit Readiness Checklist used by 30+ protocols preparing for their first audit.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

The leaderboard shows every active builder. It is public. It is sortable. It is a real receipt of who is doing the work. When you look at @Ynyesto's profile — the first builder to rebuild Uniswap V2 end to end, twice — you see a verifiable track record.

Lynx and Badges

You earn Lynx by completing work: section completion, module completion, finding real bugs in the Shadow Arena, completing eMBA lessons. Lynx accumulate. Badges represent specific milestones. The system is designed to reward consistent, real work.

Why Gamify

Because it is not actually a game. Web3 hiring — whether as a full-time engineer, a DAO contributor, or a protocol co-founder — is increasingly reputation-based. Your GitHub is one piece of evidence. Your posts are another. But a public leaderboard tied to verified work on real protocols is a different category of proof. The Academy turns every lesson, every bug you find, every module you finish into something you can point to.

Our First 44 Builders

The platform went into a private version on March 26, 2026. Over the following six weeks, 44 early builders joined and used it.

Some specific data on what they did:

3 full Uniswap V2 rebuilds completed by 2 builders. One builder did it twice, both passing all 207 tests.
Bugs found across the Shadow Arena, across multiple of the 5 live targets.
eMBA completions: early users worked through the Protocol Design and Building & Leading a Protocol Team modules, including capstone assessments.
Feedback and bugs: active contributors filed issues in the GitHub feedback repo. The platform improved weekly based on what real users hit.

Today the private version ends. Anyone can sign in and start.

We Joined the Giveth QF Round for Ethereum Security

Zealynx Academy is part of the Ethereum Security Quadratic Funding round on Giveth. The round runs April 21 – May 12, 2026, with a 500 ETH matching pool (over $1.09M) backed by TheDAO Security Fund.

Why QF

Quadratic funding rewards the number of unique supporters rather than the size of any single donation. A

5 donation from a new supporter pulls more matching from the pool than a

500 donation from one whale. For public goods like Web3 security education, that is the right incentive structure.

If the Academy's mission resonates with you, a small donation before the round closes helps us scale. Not because the $5 covers much of our cost directly — but because the matching pool amplifies unique-donor signal, and every new donor compounds the support.

We wrote a full explainer of the round, how QF works, and how to donate in two minutes: Quadratic Funding Explained: Ethereum Security QF Round.

Short version: you need a Gitcoin Passport with 50+ score. Donate on Gnosis, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Polygon (not Mainnet — gas eats small donations). Any amount counts. The link is giveth.io/project/zealynx-academy.

The ETHSecurity Badge

TheDAO Fund awarded Carlos Vendrell the ETHSecurity Badge for contribution and expertise in the Ethereum Security ecosystem. The announcement was made on X. Badge holders have approximately 2x the impact on matching calculations in this round — a mechanism TheDAO Fund is testing to see whether amplifying expert voices improves the quality of fund distribution.

The badge does not fund the Academy. It does validate that the work the Academy represents is recognized by TheDAO Fund as valuable to Ethereum security.

Roadmap

Zealynx Academy is a living platform. Some of what is shipping or in active development:

Compound V2 module — lending protocol rebuild, 18 sections, rolling out now.
Uniswap V3 module — concentrated liquidity, tick math, hooks. In planning.
More Shadow Arena targets — lending protocols (Aave, Morpho forks), bridges, stablecoin designs.
Additional eMBA modules — Growth Without Budget, Regulatory Navigation, Liquidity Bootstrapping, Governance Design.
AI Auditor Arena expansion — more Code4rena contests, more AI architectures in the builder guide.
Community integrations — deeper Telegram and Discord presence, office hours, live builder sessions.
Post-completion support (in design) — once you finish the full path, an AI companion that has followed your progress and helps you apply what you learned to your actual project.

If you want to see what we are working on week to week, follow @TheBlockChainer or @ZealynxSecurity on X.

How to Start

Go to academy.zealynx.io.
Explore the content without signing in. The landing page, module structure, Shadow Arena overview, and eMBA preview are all public.
Sign in with GitHub when you want to earn Lynx and climb ranks.
Pick your path. If you want to build, start with Uniswap V2. If you want to audit, enter the Shadow Arena (works best after doing the build). If you are a founder, head to the eMBA.

The platform is free. No credit card. No paywall. Lynx and ranks are the only currency — earned by doing the work.

Conclusion

After 30+ audits, we kept seeing the same patterns kill teams. Builders shipping code they did not understand. Founders who could build but could not launch. AI tools that could not catch basic bugs. Zealynx Academy is our answer — a single structured path that takes you from rebuilding real protocols to breaking forks to building AI security tools to launching a Web3 business.

The Academy is live. The Giveth QF round is live. The ETHSecurity Badge is live on our profile. Everything is in motion.

Start here: academy.zealynx.io

Support the round: giveth.io/project/zealynx-academy

Learn about quadratic funding: Quadratic Funding Explained

FAQ

1. What is Zealynx Academy?

Zealynx Academy is a free, interactive education platform built by Zealynx Security. It is designed for Web3 founders and builders who want to ship secure protocols and launch them as real businesses. The platform is organized around four connected pillars: rebuild real protocols from scratch, shadow-audit real forks from past security contests, build your own AI auditor agent, and learn the non-code side of launching in the eMBA for Web3 Founders. It is free to use at academy.zealynx.io.

2. Is Zealynx Academy really free?

Yes. All four pillars — Build, Shadow Arena, AI Auditor Agent builder, and eMBA — are free to access. You earn Lynx and ranks by completing work. There is no paywall, no premium tier, and no credit card required to sign in. GitHub OAuth handles authentication.

3. Who is Zealynx Academy for?

Primarily Web3 founders who want to build secure protocols and grow them into real businesses. Also useful for developers learning to build on-chain the right way, technical founders transitioning from Web2, AI engineers shipping security tools, and anyone who wants a structured path from "I want to build a protocol" to "my protocol launched and survived."

4. How is this different from Cyfrin Updraft, Alchemy University, or CryptoZombies?

Those platforms focus on teaching Solidity syntax and general Web3 concepts through video lessons and scaffolded tutorials. Zealynx Academy starts where they end: you should arrive already knowing basic Solidity. The Academy's focus is building entire production protocols from scratch, doing real shadow audits of real forks, building AI tools, and learning the business side of launching. It complements those platforms rather than competing with them.

5. What is the Shadow Arena?

The Shadow Arena is a competitive audit experience. After you have built a protocol in a module, you review a real fork from a past public security contest. You have a time-boxed window (2, 4, or 7 days depending on the target) to find vulnerabilities, submit findings, and get scored against the actual contest results. True positives earn Lynx. False positives cost Lynx after your first three. When the window closes, you get the full review of what you found and what you missed.

6. Do I need to know Solidity to start?

Basic Solidity knowledge helps. You should be comfortable with variables, functions, mappings, and basic control flow. The Academy teaches protocol architecture, design patterns, security mindset, and business design — not Solidity syntax from zero. If you need syntax basics first, CryptoZombies and Cyfrin Updraft are excellent starting points.

7. What is the Giveth QF round and why does it matter?

Zealynx Academy is part of the Ethereum Security QF round on Giveth, backed by TheDAO Security Fund's 500 ETH matching pool. Quadratic funding rewards the number of unique supporters over donation size, so a

5 donation from a new supporter pulls more matching than a

500 from one whale. Supporting the round directly funds the Academy's continued development. The round runs until May 12, 2026.

8. What is the ETHSecurity Badge?

The ETHSecurity Badge is a recognition awarded by TheDAO Fund to security experts and contributors in the Ethereum ecosystem. Badge holders have approximately 2x the impact on QF matching calculations in the Ethereum Security round. Carlos Vendrell, founder of Zealynx Security and Zealynx Academy, was recognized as a badge holder. The announcement was made on X.

9. Can I contribute to the Academy?

Yes. The Academy has a public feedback repo where users file bug reports, feature proposals, and questions. Early builders who actively contributed during the private phase were called Academy Insiders — and their feedback directly shaped the platform. If you want to contribute content, reach out to @TheBlockChainer or @ZealynxSecurity on X.

Glossary

Term	Definition
Shadow Audit	A training exercise where you audit a real past security contest on a known-graded protocol fork, inside a time-boxed window, scored against the actual contest results.
AI Auditor	An AI system designed to detect smart contract vulnerabilities. Ranges from simple LLM prompts to full agentic pipelines with specialized detection and verification stages.
eMBA for Web3 Founders	Zealynx Academy's business-focused track covering tokenomics, fundraising, governance, treasury, regulatory, go-to-market, and launch operations for technical founders.
Quadratic Funding	A funding mechanism that amplifies donations based on the number of unique supporters rather than total amount raised. Used by Gitcoin, Giveth, and Optimism for public goods funding.
Gitcoin Passport	A decentralized identity system for proving you are a real human online. Used by QF rounds to prevent sybil attacks.
Public Goods	Goods that benefit everyone but are hard to fund through normal markets because benefits are diffuse. Open security research and education are canonical Web3 examples.

View complete glossary →

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Zealynx Academy Is Public: Build, Audit, and Launch Web3 Protocols

TL;DR — Quick Summary

Why We Built It