How Crypto Actually Works: a free 90,000 word book in fifteen chapters

A book published as a repository, before the first edition exists

The framing of this project is unusual for a technical book and it explains the repository's structure. The current status is stated as Pre-First Edition, open for community feedback before the official first edition is published as a free ebook, and the release tag says the same thing in slightly different words, Pre-First Edition: Community Review. The repository contains the complete text of the book, which is open source and free to read, download and share, and it is published on GitHub to collect feedback, with the best edits and corrections intended to be incorporated into the official first edition, which will be released as a free ebook on Amazon and other platforms in the coming months. The author is Larry Cermak, with Igor Igamberdiev and Bohdan Pavlov of Wintermute as co-authors, reviewers from Wintermute Research and The Block Research, and Tim Copeland as editor. That list is itself a signal about the intended audience. The people named are market structure and research people rather than protocol engineers, and the reviewers are research teams, so the framing is a book about how crypto markets and systems work rather than a book about how a hash function is constructed.

The problem the book is trying to solve is a sourcing problem

The stated motivation is worth reading closely because it is a claim about the state of the field rather than about the book's contents. The author tried to recommend a single resource that could give candidates a solid foundation in crypto and came up short, and the reasons given are a taxonomy of what is wrong with what exists. Some books dive deeply into one protocol and ignore the rest. YouTube and X overflow with thinly disguised advertising. The best research is scattered across dozens of paywalled sites. Academic papers are rigorous but too abstract for practical learning. The summary is that everything was missing something, too narrow, too biased, too advanced, too fragmented, or simply too hard to approach without a guide. That diagnosis explains the chapter list. If the problem were depth, a single-chain book would be the answer. The problem is breadth and approachability, so the book is organised as a curriculum that moves from one protocol to the market layer and then to the applications on top, and the preface is titled Why This Matters to make the case for reading it in order. The stated audience is people who want to understand how the technology actually works, not just traders or investors, and it assumes intellectual curiosity but no prior expertise.

Fifteen chapters ordered as a curriculum, not as a list of protocols

The table of contents is the clearest evidence for the structured-learning claim, and the ordering is the argument. It opens with a preface, then goes to a comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin, the Ethereum ecosystem, the Solana ecosystem and L1 blockchains, which is the layer where the differences between chains are laid out. From there the book moves outward to the things built on top and around them: custody fundamentals, crypto market structure and trading, DeFi, MEV, stablecoins and RWAs, a dedicated chapter on Hyperliquid, non-fungible tokens, governance and token economics, DePIN, quantum resistance and prediction markets. The shape of that sequence is worth noting. Protocol chapters come first and come in threes, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, which suggests the book treats the chains as cases rather than as a survey, and the market layer arrives before the applications. MEV sits between DeFi and stablecoins rather than in a theory section, and a single chapter on one specific exchange protocol in the middle of the list tells you the book is willing to go deep on one system when that system matters. The README says each chapter builds on the last, creating a coherent story that gradually increases in complexity, and there is a table_of_contents.md for a full section-by-section breakdown, which is a good sign for a text meant to be read as a sequence.

What the project claims about currency, and how it justifies that

The book is described as actively maintained with current data, protocols and market realities, and the reasoning given is that crypto moves fast and most books are outdated before they hit the shelf. That is a claim about the subject rather than about the book, but it is verifiable in one respect: the repository is a git repository with a push on 2026-10-12 and a contribution process aimed at keeping it current. The maintenance claim is also the reason the book is being published in this unusual order, with the open review before the first edition. Two other claims in the same list are worth separating out. Each chapter was reviewed by someone who works deeply in that specific area, and the review teams are named. The honesty claim is that technical ideas are explained clearly without dumbing them down, and that both strengths and limitations are discussed. That is a differentiator worth watching for in a domain where books routinely skip the limitations, and the existence of a chapter on MEV and one on quantum resistance suggests the uncomfortable topics are in scope rather than deferred. The stated effect on the reader is blunt, that if you read it carefully and absorb the key ideas you will end up knowing more than most people who work in crypto full time today.

The licence is split between contributions and the compiled book

The licensing needs care, because there are two different terms in play. The documentation states that all contributions must be your original work and contributed under a CC-BY license, while the compiled book is published under CC-BY-NC-ND, which the README names in full as the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. That split has practical consequences. You may quote from the book with attribution, and you may reuse individual contributed sections under the looser CC-BY terms, but you may not publish a modified or translated version of the compiled work, and a commercial use of the compiled text is not permitted. The NoDerivatives clause is what makes a translation a derived work, which is worth knowing before you plan one, and it also means a fork with edits is not permitted even if the edits are corrections. The repository lists a Korean translation hosted in a separate repository, which suggests the authors treat translations as a licensed or agreed exception rather than something contributors may simply do. The explanation given for the choice is both practical and philosophical, that traditional publishing cannot keep pace with how crypto evolves and that basic education should not be locked behind paywalls.

How to contribute, and what the review process expects

The contribution process is stated in enough detail to be useful. The project is actively seeking expert reviewers and contributors to help refine the content before the official first edition, and there is a CONTRIBUTING.md at the root of the repository with the details. The size of a change determines the route. For small corrections, submit a pull request with the fix. For larger changes or new sections, coordinate with the author first. For questions or discussion, open an issue. The instruction to use separate commits for each change is to make review easier, and significant contributors are acknowledged in future editions. The distinction between a small correction and larger new sections is the important one to internalise, because a chapter rewrite is a conversation rather than a pull request, and a reviewer with no context on the surrounding argument is unlikely to have the right judgement on a rewrite. The repository structure is the simplest possible shape for a book, with a Chapters directory holding one markdown file per chapter including the preface, a table_of_contents.md at the root, a readme.md, the CONTRIBUTING.md and a .gitignore. There is no build system and no code, which is the point: the text is the artefact and the pull requests are the review mechanism.

What you get when you open it, and where to start

There is no install step, because there is nothing to install, and that is worth saying plainly for anyone deciding whether this is worth their time. The book is read as markdown in the repository, or as a table of contents with a link per chapter. The documentation says to start with the preface, which is titled Why This Matters, or to open the table of contents for the section-by-section breakdown. The preface being mandatory reading is a small design choice with a large effect, since a reader who starts at chapter 1 without it will not know why the ordering is what it is. The length is given as 90,000+ words across 15 chapters plus a preface, which is a substantial reading commitment, on the order of a long paper or a short textbook, and the twelve listed differences from other books are a reasonable set of reasons to attempt it. One thing to be clear about is what this is not. It is not a reference manual to look up a protocol detail, and it is not a trading strategy guide, and the fact that a chapter is devoted to one specific exchange protocol should not be read as an endorsement of that protocol. The value claimed is coverage with depth in the right places, and the way to judge it is to read one chapter that covers ground you know and see whether the framing matches how you would have explained it.

Editorial conclusion

How Crypto Actually Works is a good fit for a developer, analyst or candidate who needs one structured text that connects the protocol level to the market level, and for anyone who wants to check a claim about how a crypto system behaves rather than take it on trust. It is the wrong tool for a specialist who already knows one chain in depth, and it is the wrong tool if you want to cite it as a stable reference, since the current version is explicitly a pre-first-edition draft open for revision and the compiled text is published under a licence with no derivatives clause. Before relying on it, read the licence note carefully, because individual contributions are under CC-BY while the compiled book is CC BY-NC-ND, so a translation or a derivative work is a different question from quoting it. The last push was on 2026-10-12 and the only tagged release is v0.1.0 from 2026-02-25.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. lawmaster10/howcryptoworksbook on GitHub
3. README
4. Releases