NOTE: Previously RSM2322 – Special Topics in Finance: Blockchain and Decentralized Finance
General Information
Promotional Video
Not Available
Instructor Bios
Andreas Park is a Professor of Finance at the University of Toronto, appointed to the Rotman School of Management and the Department of Management at UTM. He serves as the Academic Director at the FinHub, Rotman’s Financial Innovation Lab. He has served as a lab economist for the Blockchain stream at the Creative Destruction Lab (a world-leading start-up accelerator program) and advised various entities such as regulatory agencies, FinTech start-ups, and large banks. Andreas teaches undergraduate, graduate, and executive courses on payments innovation, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, and financial market trading, and his current research focuses on the economic impact of technological transformations such as blockchain technology. He co-authored a design proposal for a central bank-issued digital currency, commissioned by the Bank of Canada. He’s serving on the Ontario Securities Commission’s Market Structure Advisory Committee and currently heads the Canadian Securities Administrators Data Fee Methodology Committee.
Target Audience
MBA students in the finance stream.
Prerequisites
Must have completed MBA core courses – RSM1231 Finance 1: Global Markets and Valuation and RSM1232 Finance 2: Corporate Finance
Format
12 weekly sessions
Course Mission
- Understand the technological and organizational principles of blockchain technology.
- Get introduced to existing protocols, tools, and applications of blockchain technology to finance.
- Understand the economics of decentralized platforms.
- Understand legal, regulatory, and accounting challenges as well as the challenges to the legacy financial industry.
- Identify business opportunities of the technology and develop a design for a decentralized finance application.
Evaluation and Grade Breakdown
| Component | Due Date | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Class Participation | Ongoing | 5% |
| Quizzes (8) | Ongoing | 25% |
| DeFi protocol analysis | Week 8 | 15% |
| DeFi application design (group work) | Week 11 | 10% |
| Presentation of DeFi application (group work) | Week 11 | 5% |
| Peer critique and feedback | Week 12 | 5% |
| Final exam | TBC | 35% |
Required Resources
Please note: The blockchain and defi space is fast moving and any textbook is bound to be outdated by the time it is available in print. The book below is an excellent starting point, but does not cover all the topics that are relevant to the class.
Textbook: “DeFi and the Future of Finance”, Campbell R. Harvey, Ashwin Ramachandran, Joey Santoro, Fred Ehrsam (Foreword by), Vitalik Buterin (Preface by)
ISBN: 978-1-119-83602-5 August 2021 208 Pages
Readings: supplementary material in the form of articles and blog posts
Other video and audio resources:
- I am co-hosting a podcast series (joint with Fahad Saleh from The University of Florida) and AvaLabs titled “Crafting the Crypto-Economy”. It is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts; here is a description: https://www.owlexplains.com/en/podcasts/avalabsxcber/1/
- I am a co-founder and co-organizer of the Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research Forum. We hold a bi-weekly online webinar series; more information is here: https://www.cber-forum.org/