This course is for students wishing to explore blockchain technology's potential use—by entrepreneurs and incumbents—to change the world of money and finance. The course begins with a review of Bitcoin and an understanding of the commercial, technical, and public policy fundamentals of blockchain technology, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. The class then continues on to current and potential blockchain applications in the financial sector.

The current high growth & adoption of financial applications can be traced back to the arrival of cloud storage in 2006. The big idea was the creation of a simple, scalable, service that could easily plug into existing software. The world of DeFi will mirror this trajectory, and usher in a wave of innovation the likes of which have never seen before in finance.

Celo is an open platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone.

Stuart Levi, Mana Ghaemmaghami, MacKinzie Neal and Allison Shapiro look at the IP and contract issues raised by nonfungible tokens (NFTs).