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Welcome to

The Fundamentals of Finance & Economics

Prf. Williams talks about the world of cryptocurrencies, contemporary fintech and how these markets are likely to evolve into the future.

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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.

Course details

Duration: 

7 days

Weekly study: 

2 hours

Delivery: 

100% online

Certificate: 

Digital participation

Unit 1: Welcome to the course
  • Welcome
  • What are the benefits of these courses?
  • Get your digital certificate of attendance
  • How to get the most out of this course
Unit 2: Why study in the UK?
  • Find out what a UK education can do for you
  • How can Academic Action help you?
Unit 3: The Fundamentals of Finance & Economics - Developement of Contemporary Fintech: From Bitcoin to Smart Contracts, A Brief Journey inside the Black Box
  • Introduction
  • Key concepts
  • Payment transaction networks
  • High level features
  • Threats & countermeasures
  • Towards distributed markets
  • Features
  • The limit order book
  • The distributed market
Unit 4: Our host university
  • An overview of our host university
  • Quiz
  • Book a one-to-one meeting with our university representatives

Who will you learn with?

Head of Department of Finance at Durham University, Professor in Accounting and Finance
BSc, MSc, PhD
Ana-Maria Costea
International Officer
Durham University

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