The Fundamentals of Finance & Economics

Developement of Contemporary Fintech: From Bitcoin to Smart Contracts - A Brief Journey inside the Black Box

Distributed ledger technology has had an “up and down” reputation throughout the last few years. Bitcoins and similar cryptocurrencies have the core focus in terms of an asset market to invest in.

However, the underpinning technologies, blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs and secure multi-party computation have many more uses beyond payment markets. One approach, with a current example of an implementation by FTX (https://ftx.com) builds an entire market through this type of technology.

Building a fully distributed market without any trusted exchange is quite a challenge.

In this lecture Prf. William is going to discuss the basic issues of how to build on and how this type of technology could completely change the way we do finance in the future. In this lecture we will talk about trading mechanisms, approaches to designing markets and how these markets are likely to evolve into the future.