Overview
Lovelace Academy is a free library of written tutorials on building blockchain software one command at a time, last updated in September 2022 and unchanged since. The finished walkthroughs open with what a reader will learn and the hardware needed, then hand over shell commands to copy into a terminal1. It was written for people who want to build rather than invest, and the site says as much in Starting Your Journey2.
The lessons cover Cardano. Lovelace Academy was started by three stake pool operators, Maria Carmo, Keith, and Shweta Chauhan, who saw no route for a newcomer asking why and how to build on the chain3. The material is published under a Creative Commons licence, so it can be reused, translated, or adapted as long as the source is credited and any adaptation is shared on the same terms4.
Key Features
- A 2022 walkthrough for standing up a node. A node is the software that keeps its own copy of the blockchain. The guide names the hardware, lists four ways to get a suitable machine, and walks the install one shell command at a time, as those steps stood in 20221.
- Minting guides you can follow along with. The NFT guide runs from writing the rule that governs a token's supply, through uploading artwork to decentralized storage, to submitting the transaction that creates the token; a separate guide covers fungible tokens5.
- Stated goals and prerequisites. The node guide opens with a goals list and a hardware prerequisites list, then hands off to the next lesson at the end1.
- Nothing to sign up for. The lessons sit on an open website with no account to create and no paywall6.
- A separate course for smart contracts. Deeper material on Plutus, Cardano's smart-contract framework (smart contracts are programs that run directly on a blockchain), lives in the twelve-module Plutus Experience course from the same team, which needs Nix and GNU/Linux to run7.
What to Expect
The site is plain, with the lesson tracks listed down one side: getting started, tokens, integrating Cardano, fundamentals, Plutus, and Marlowe6. A reader works through a page and clicks on to the next lesson, though only some tracks carry runnable commands.
Depth is uneven across those tracks, and the pages say so. The getting-started track walks through node setup, keys and addresses1; the token track covers minting end to end5. The integrating-Cardano and smart-contract pages are short outlines that were never completed, carrying coming-soon notes left from 2021; the Plutus outline sends readers out to external material such as the Plutus Pioneer Program8.
The written guides were last updated in September 2022 and have not been revised since, so the commands reflect the Cardano tooling of that period rather than current practice. Someone working through the token guides against a test network will need to substitute the current network identifier for the one printed in the guide5. Lovelace Academy also published video lessons on its YouTube channel, which ran until September 2025 and is the more recent of the two.
