In its exploration of the future of money and payments, this course focuses on technology, finance, and public policy. Money and payments have long been dominated by physical cash and by bank-railed payments. We will investigate ongoing improvements and disruptions of these conventional approaches with new technologies, including fast payment systems, central bank digital currencies, and applications of cryptography such as blockchain-based digital ledgers, stable-coins, zero-knowledge proofs, smart-contract settlement, and automated market making, as well as the state-of-the-art technologies, like Polygon and Solana. Policy and compliance concerns include financial inclusion, efficiency, disruption of banking, privacy, anti-money laundering, financial stability, and monetary policy transmission.
The group project will circle around the cross-currency payment systems, in which there are two options: research project and business proposal. We will discuss more in detailed later in class.
Grading is based on frequent project report or essay (50%) and self-reflection (50%). There is no final exam. This syllabus is a live course document that will be updated on a rolling basis during this semester. Detailed can be seen at the end of the syllabus.
- Teacher: jeromeyen, Jerome Yen