Intro to Blockchain Workshop
A weekend of foundations, with COMETS and Binance at Polytechnic University of Bucharest
A Workshop Built for First Contact
On the weekend of April 25 and 26, Polytechnic University of Bucharest opened its doors to students and the wider Bucharest community for a hands-on Intro to Blockchain Workshop, run by COMETS in partnership with Binance. Three groups ran across the two days, each one a four hour session built around the same idea: give people serious about learning a proper first contact with the space, taught by the people who work in it every day.
UPB was a natural home for this. The engineering crowd brings curiosity and the patience to sit with new concepts, and the room had a mix of students hearing about blockchain for the first time and others who had been circling the space and wanted a clean foundation to build on.
Two Sessions, One Foundation
Each group followed the same structure. Binance Academy opened with a session on crypto fundamentals and security in Web3, walking participants through how the space actually works and how to move through it safely. Real examples of scams, what to watch for, and the habits worth building early. The kind of session that pays off the moment someone makes their first wallet.
COMETS picked up from there with the introductory blockchain curriculum: how blockchain works under the hood, public and private keys, custodial and non-custodial wallets, Bitcoin and Ethereum as use cases, smart contracts, and a brief tour of the broader Web3 ecosystem. The session closed with a segment on crypto taxation in Romania, a topic that matters far more than most beginners realize and one that rarely gets covered in introductory material.
A Format That Earned Its Keep
The two-part structure worked because it answered the two questions every newcomer has at the same time: how do I not lose my money, and how does any of this work. By the second hour of each group, the questions coming from the floor had moved past the basics. Students were asking about specific projects, real use cases, and where to take their curiosity next. That is exactly where you want a room to land at the end of an intro.
Romania has one of the most active grassroots crypto user bases in the region, and yet structured beginner education in universities is still scarce. Running this workshop at UPB, with Binance on the technical fundamentals and COMETS on the broader foundation and the local tax context, gave students a starting point that connects to the reality of using blockchain here, not just the theory of it.
Until the Next One
This weekend reinforced something we have believed since COMETS started: the CEE blockchain scene grows fastest when education meets the people who are curious about it, in the places they already are. UPB was one of those places. More university workshops are already in motion, and we will see you at the next one!
