Crypto prover / auditor (P4) · 5 units
From crypto charts to a record you can recompute
You came from crypto charts, where volatility is the whole game — and you care whether a record is real, not just loud. This path connects what you already read on a chart to how volatility is priced, then to how Kestrel turns a run into a certified record you can recompute yourself and check against anyone else. Short and direct; each unit ends on something you can run.
Start the pathWhat a chart actually is- Market fundamentals · BeginnerWhat a chart actually isA chart is an event record, not a picture. It plots price against time, and each candle compresses one interval into four numbers: the open and close, where price started and ended, and the high and low, how far it reached each way. The body spans open to close; the thin wicks mark the extremes. Colour encodes direction only — green closed above its open, red below — never good or bad. Read left to right, a run of candles becomes a sentence: where price began, what it tested, where it settled. A chart records what happened and when. It does not encode why, and it does not tell you what happens next. Learning to read one is learning the alphabet before you can read the words. This unit defines the candle, then reads a generic session as a story you can run and recompute yourself.
- Market fundamentals · IntermediateWhat volatility isVolatility is the size of price movement, not its direction — how far and how fast an instrument travels, regardless of which way. It comes in two kinds that are easy to confuse. Realized volatility is backward-looking: it measures how much price actually moved over a past window, a fact you can compute off the tape. Implied volatility is forward-looking: it is the movement the market is currently pricing in for the future, read out of option prices, so it is the market's own estimate of its uncertainty — its price of not knowing. The two diverge, and that divergence is the whole game one level up: when the crowd expects a storm, implied rises above what has realized; when it calms, implied falls back. Volatility is the bridge from reading charts to reading options, because an option is a contract whose price is built on it. This unit reads a generic session where volatility spikes and subsides, then points you into the options track.
- Kestrel-native · IntermediateThe receipt you can re-verify yourselfA proof URL is a certified Grade served as a public, anonymous, read-only artifact — no account, no key, no login. Two independent checks make it trustworthy without trusting the server. In a browser, the page fetches kestrel's published verify key from a well-known document and re-verifies the Grade's Ed25519 signature client-side, against the artifact's pinned roots. On the command line, the CLI goes further and recomputes the whole record byte for byte on your own machine, then asserts it matches. Either way you trust the math, not the server's word for it. That is why a proof URL is the conversion evidence an agent hands its human at the end of a free trial: it is a shareable, re-verifiable object, not a screenshot or a claim. This unit explains what a proof URL contains, the two checks anyone can run, and why the receipt is the atom the whole trust chain is built from.
- Kestrel-native · AdvancedThere is no letter gradeA Kestrel Grade never hands back a letter or a single score. It reports separated, honest numbers: a realized floor in dollars — strict-cross, only the fills that were definite — an expected value under an explicit fill-survival model, stated as a bound and never the headline, and a bankable EV that refuses any expectation resting on extrapolated support. The floor is what you can stand on; the expected value is a modeled bound above it; the bankable number is the conservative one you are allowed to carry forward. Grades are date-blind so hindsight cannot leak into the score, and practice Grades are structurally non-ranking — the eligibility type has no honest-ranking member, so an unlimited-retry practice result can never be promoted onto a ranking, even by a bug. This unit shows why the separation is the point: one collapsed score would hide exactly the uncertainty an honest receipt is supposed to expose.
- Kestrel-native · AdvancedCertification is a state transitionCertification does not compute your result — it attests to one already computed. The deterministic sim and Grade run and emit an unsigned bundle: input roots, artifact roots, engine and runtime versions, the judge, the output root, and a replay manifest. A separate control-plane verifier establishes correctness by pinned recomputation and then signs that exact bundle. No certification key ever enters the compute path, which is why self-hosted Kestrel produces the same numbers as the platform — only the platform mints the attested receipt. The signature is an attestation that these bytes were established correct, never an authority signature that grants the holder any power. Anyone can recompute the result and check the math; the platform's role is to seal it. This unit shows why the attestation-versus- authority line is load-bearing: it is what lets an outsider trust a proof without trusting the server, and what keeps a receipt from ever being a key.