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Learn this for nothing.
We review paid courses and earn a commission when people buy them. We also think most people do not need one. Here is everything worth reading that costs nothing — ours and other people's.
Published
There is an obvious tension in a site that earns affiliate commission publishing a page about not needing to buy anything. We would rather hold it openly than pretend the paid options are more necessary than they are.
The honest position: a good $12 course buys you structure and pacing — an ordered path and someone walking you through it. That is worth $12 to a lot of people. It does not buy you information that is otherwise unavailable. Almost everything in the beginner courses we review is covered below, free, in more depth.
Our guides · 121 minutes total
The complete free course.
Read in this order and you have covered more ground than most paid beginner courses. No account, no email, no upsell at the end.
- 01 12 minWhat are NFTs, actually? The concept without the hype, including what you do not own when you buy one.
- 02 14 minHow to buy an NFT Wallet, funding, marketplace, and the mistakes that cost beginners real money.
- 03 15 minHow to create and mint one From a file on your laptop to a token on a chain, for a few cents.
- 04 11 minStoring NFTs safely Seed phrases, hardware wallets, and why most losses are phishing rather than hacking.
- 05 13 minScams and red flags Each common scam, how it actually works, and the signal that gives it away.
- 06 9 minRoyalties explained Why the 5% you were promised often does not arrive.
- 07 14 minNFT taxes Cost basis, disposals, and the trap of paying with appreciated crypto.
- 08 10 minWeb3, explained What the term means once you remove the marketing.
- 09 12 minSmart contracts What the code does, what it cannot do, and why immutability cuts both ways.
- 10 11 minUtility and gaming Where the activity went after the speculative phase ended.
Elsewhere
Other people's free material.
None of these are affiliate links. They are here because they are the best free resources in the subject, and several are better than anything paid.
| Resource | What it is | Who for |
|---|---|---|
| Ethereum.org documentation | The canonical explanation of accounts, transactions, gas and the NFT standards. Free, maintained, and better written than most paid material. | Anyone, at any level |
| CryptoZombies | An interactive Solidity course that teaches by building a game. Still the friendliest on-ramp to contract code. | Aspiring developers |
| Speedrun Ethereum | A series of build challenges from the Scaffold-ETH team, including an NFT challenge. Practical rather than theoretical. | Developers who learn by building |
| OpenZeppelin Contracts | The reference ERC-721 and ERC-1155 implementations, with documentation. Reading these is the fastest way to understand the standards properly. | Developers |
| Solidity documentation | The language reference, including the security considerations chapter that most courses compress into fifteen minutes. | Developers |
| Ethernaut | Security wargames where you break deliberately vulnerable contracts. The single best free resource for developing security instincts. | Developers before deploying anything of value |
When paying is actually the right call
Three situations, honestly:
- You need someone to pace you. If you have started and abandoned free material twice, a structured course with a progress bar may genuinely be what gets you through. That is a real difference and worth $12.
- You want a specific instructor. Some people teach unusually well. Watching five minutes of free preview tells you whether someone's delivery works for you.
- You want exercises with answers. The developer courses in particular include structured projects that are more valuable than reading documentation alone.
If none of those apply, the material above will get you there. If one does, the ranking is here — and we would rather you bought the right one than any one.