Blockchain Masterclass for Banking and Finance

Explore blockchain technology as a trust machine, uncover its four core concepts—distributed shared ledgers, asymmetric cryptography, consensus, and smart contracts—and examine immutability, security, transparency, trust, and decentralization in practice.

Compare centralized and decentralized blockchains by examining consensus mechanisms, validation roles, and how forks are prevented, with attention to permissioned and permissionless designs.

Examine centralized and decentralized blockchain consensus, compare proof of work with proof of stake, and survey proof systems such as proof of activity, burn, capacity, and delegated stake in finance.

Explore tokens, token economics, and how blockchain enables automation across money and finance. Discover digital scarcity, immutability, and utility tokens like Ether and BAT within open protocols.

Explain how smart contracts encode if-then rules on blockchain to enable autonomous, automatic actions, using oracles for off-chain data and a multi-layer ecosystem of infrastructure, enablers, and tokens.

Explore how smart contracts power decentralized apps by running on multiple distributed nodes, offering security, resilience, and open source innovation, with easy development using Ethereum and other platforms.

Explore how decentralized autonomous organizations leverage smart contracts, token issuance, and governance tokens to fund and govern autonomous ventures, from finance to culture.

This case study examines daos through constitution dao and dune dao, illustrating how blockchain based entities bid on physical assets, address thresholds, security, transport, and museum partnerships.

Understand core blockchain properties such as immutability, programmability, and resilience, while examining consensus, permissioned versus permissionless networks, and defi applications like MakerDAO.

Explore the three functions of money—store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account—and assess why cryptocurrencies today fall short of fiat, while blockchain powers future fiat and DeFi.

Differentiate digital currencies, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and cbdcs, noting that cryptocurrencies are blockchain-based and decentralized, stablecoins are pegged on blockchains, and cbdcs are central bank digital currencies.

Stablecoins use blockchain to peg to fiat currencies or resources, countering short-term volatility for crypto users in DeFi, with fiat collateralized, crypto collateralized, or algorithmic models.

Explore cbdcs, centralized, blockchain-based money pegged to national currencies, for a programmable value economy, with wholesale versus retail models and notable projects like the sand dollar and digital yuan.

Analyze CBDCs across the Bahamas Sand Dollar, Sweden's Krona, China's initiative, and the EU's proof of concept, assessing wholesale versus retail use, whether they bear interest, platform capacity, and timelines.

Explore how blockchain enables commercial, retail, and investment banks to solve double spend, ensure digital scarcity, automate processes with smart contracts, and cut costs across cross-border payments and trade finance.

Explore DeFi, the blockchain-based decentralized finance ecosystem that uses smart contracts and tokens to create trustless, composable money modules, including loans, derivatives, insurances, and decentralized exchanges.

Examine how DeFi and open finance intersect through JP Morgan Chase and MakerDAO, detailing Dai, collateralized assets, and bank collaboration with decentralized finance.

Explore seven core finance use cases, including payments and remittances, fundraising, loans and syndicated loans, securities and asset management, trade finance, and identity and compliance on blockchain.

Explore how blockchain transforms payments and remittances, reducing cross-border costs and processing times, while banks move from permissionless to permissioned networks through co-opetition.

Analyze how Coinbase's crypto credit card illustrates a centralized approach, with fiat payments converted to usd and crypto rewards, adding a layer rather than true disintermediation.

Learn how authorization, clearance, and settlement enable funds transfers, why settlement is highly intermediated, and how blockchain's shared ledger could enable settlement within a couple of minutes.

Examine the Swift network as a secure messaging system connecting 11,000 institutions worldwide, with settlements by national banks, and why Swift's blockchain pilot paused for readiness and standardization.

Explore how Ripple Labs blends centralized banking with blockchain through the Ripple Ledger and XRP token, reducing liquidity costs and pursuing the US dollar as a settlement currency.

JPM Coin is a dollar-backed corporate stablecoin for internal clearance and settlement, enabling faster, lower-cost institutional transactions and programmable money via Ethereum smart contracts.

Assess core money features, CBDCs as digital currencies pegged to fiat, and how blockchain can support compliance and remittances in banking.

Explore how initial coin offerings enable global fundraising on permissionless blockchains by issuing tokens sold for immediate liquidity, while lax regulation fueled scams and high failure rates.

The bat token tokenizes user attention via Brave browser, rewarding users with bat tokens for ads, while in May 2017 Ethereum ICO reserves tokens for marketing, developers, donations, and micropayments.

Explore the Zhuo coin, a blockchain token for litigation finance, enabling investment in lawsuits without contracts and simplifying kyc, issuance, and investor risk.

Explore how blockchain enables securities and asset management by tokenizing assets, breaking data silos, and using smart contracts for proxy voting, transfers, and fractional ownership.

ASX partners with Digital Asset Holdings and VMware to build a blockchain based clearing and settlement system, aiming for faster, less bureaucratic, and more secure securities trading through smart contracts.

Explore how Meta Capital tokenized 350 million USD of real estate using consensus and Codefi assets on Ethereum. Smart contracts enable compliance, KYC efficiency, fractional ownership, and a secondary market.

Examine how loan markets operate from consumer and corporate lending to syndicated loans, identifying inefficiencies and how blockchain offers faster, secure issuance and smart contracts for peer-to-peer lending.

Deploy smart contracts on a blockchain to automate loan issuance, reduce costs, and secure assets such as cars, improving risk management and data protection.

Finastra's LenderComm uses blockchain to create a golden source of truth for syndicated loans, enabling real-time credit, accrual balances, and loan visibility.

Discover trustless lending through Salt, a non-custodial smart contract platform that uses crypto collateral, Ethereum ERC20 tokens, and no traditional credit checks to enable loans.

Explore the essential role of trade finance in liquidity and risk mitigation, underpinning 80 to 90% of global trade, while highlighting its paper-based processes and blockchain and AI intersections.

Blockchain enables a shared, immutable ledger for trade finance, uniting letters of credit and bills of lading. Smart contracts automate payments, reducing cycles, costs, and fraud.

Trade finance relies on consortia to build trust among banks, exporters, and importers, with Corda-based Voltron and Marco Polo, IBM-led We.trade and Batavia, and HKFP shaping the future.

Explore we.trade, a Hyperledger fabric-based trade consortium owned by 12 banks, IBM and CRIF, enabling exporters to access blockchain-based trade finance, letters of credit, and end-to-end trade workflows.