About Zealynx Academy
We are protocol auditors who got tired of seeing builders fork code they don't understand. So we built a platform where you learn by building the real thing from scratch.
Every section starts with a blank function and a passing-tests target. You don't watch us code — you write the code, and the test suite tells you what is missing. The result is the kind of understanding you only get from shipping it yourself.
We teach what we learned auditing 30+ live DeFi protocols: the patterns that worked, the mistakes that cost real money, and the architectural decisions that age well versus the ones that turn into incidents three months after mainnet.
Built by Zealynx Security
Zealynx Academy is created by Zealynx Security, a boutique smart contract audit firm based in Wroclaw, Poland. We have completed 30+ protocol audits for clients including Fair Labs, Novaswap, Golden Grid, Inverter, Mangrove, and more.
Every lesson, test, and security pattern in the Academy comes from real audit experience. When we say "this is how a reentrancy guard should be implemented," it is because we have seen what happens when it is not.
Our audit work spans AMMs (Uniswap forks, Balancer variants), lending markets (Compound forks, Aave-style isolated pools), yield vaults (Yearn forks, ERC-4626 strategies), and oracle integrations across Chainlink, Pyth, and bespoke price feeds. Every Academy module mirrors a protocol we have actually audited, so the lessons are not theoretical — they are the specific things we look for during a real engagement.
30+
Protocol Audits
845+
Security Checks
Free
To Start
Founded by Carlos Vendrell
Carlos Vendrell is the founder and lead auditor at Zealynx Security. He has personally reviewed 30+ DeFi protocols across AMMs, lending pools, vaults, bridges, and governance systems. He created Zealynx Academy because he saw the same problem over and over: builders forking protocols without understanding what they were forking.
The Academy is his answer: a platform where you build production protocols from scratch, function by function, so you truly understand the code before you build on top of it. Then you audit a real fork to develop security intuition. Then you learn the business side with the eMBA for Web3 Founders.
Carlos started as a Solidity developer shipping products on top of DeFi primitives. Auditing came later — and the gap between the two worlds is exactly the one the Academy is built to close. The platform reflects that path: build the protocol like an engineer, audit it like an attacker, then think about it like a founder.
Why We Built This
During our audits, we kept seeing the same pattern: teams would fork Uniswap V2 or Compound, modify a few functions, and deploy. When we flagged vulnerabilities, they often did not understand the original code well enough to evaluate our findings. They had forked without understanding.
We realized there was no platform that made you build the protocol instead of copying it. Tutorials teach you theory. Bootcamps teach you syntax. But nobody makes you write the swap() function, the mint() function, the fee calculation, from scratch, guided, until you pass all 207 tests.
That is what Zealynx Academy does. And after you build it, we let you audit a real fork of it in the Shadow Arena. And then we teach you how to launch the business around it with the eMBA.
The 207 tests in the Uniswap V2 module are not gamification. Each one corresponds to a property of the protocol that, if violated, leads to a real exploit class we have either seen in an audit or written PoCs for. The Compound V2 and Yearn V2 modules are structured the same way. By the time you finish a module, you have not just rebuilt the protocol — you have rebuilt the test suite an auditor would actually run against it.
How the Academy is different
We are not trying to be the cheapest crash course or the longest bootcamp. We are trying to be the platform that produces builders who understand what they are shipping.
Most Web3 learning resources optimize for completion time. Watch a four-hour video. Clone a starter repo. Hit deploy. The Academy optimizes for retention instead. The lessons are slower because you write every function yourself against a test suite that does not pass until you do. You cannot fork what you have actually built line by line — the understanding sticks.
The same approach carries through the other product lines. Auditing is taught by running your own audit against a real fork from a past competitive contest in the Shadow Arena, then comparing your findings against the disclosed report. Business is taught through the eMBA for Web3 Founders — the actual operating decisions a founder makes, sequenced, with the trade-offs spelled out by people who have shipped and seen both outcomes.
Everything is free to start. There is no paywall on the curriculum, no upsell on the first module, no upgrade prompt before you have earned something. We make money on the audit side of the business — the Academy exists to grow the pool of builders we would eventually want to audit for.
Our Tools
Krait
AI-powered smart contract security analysis. 16 detection angles, 43 heuristics, 26 analysis modules. Available as CLI and web platform. Powers the Shadow Arena scoring engine.
Zealynx Security
Smart contract audits for DeFi protocols. AMMs, lending pools, vaults, bridges, governance. The team behind the Academy.