Overview
In this unique, knowledge packed masterclass you will learn all the basics as well as higher-level, non-technical expertise needed to master your understanding of blockchain technology and its impact on business.
Practical, real-life applications, separation of hype from reality and a deep understanding of concepts, operational functionality and the important components of the ecosystem results in a very impactful 2 day course for business leaders.
Unique to the masterclass is a focus on regulation and wider implications of the technology, beyond its use cases, as well as new developments, such as ICOs.
Your trainer Dr. Massimo Morini
Dr. Massimo Morini is one of the most sought after speakers and thought leaders at the intersection of blockchain and business. He is currently the Head Of Interest Rate and Credit Models & Coordinator Of Model Research at BANCA IMI, as well as a senior consultant to the World Bank and other supranational institutions. He is also a member of the Scientific Committee of Numerix Software, one of the leading providers of innovative capital markets technology solutions and real-time intelligence capabilities for trading and risk management.
Massimo wrote some of the very first articles proposing the application of the Blockchain to Financial Markets and co-developed smart contracts for collateralized financial products on Ethereum. He was also a board member for R3, the financial services Blockchain mega consortium, where he headed the Valuation, Collateral & Risk Management working group, and is currently a member of the scientific committee for Blockchain Lab, a Swiss based consortium of Bitcoin developers. He has written numerous articles on Blockchain, including in Risk Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Financial Transformation and others.
• Foundations of cryptography: hashing, symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, digital signature, examples
• How transactions work
• Pseudonymity
• Wallets, Exchanges and other services
• Foundations of distributed databases: replication vs duplication, homogeneity vs heterogeneity, examples
• Blockchain: Logic, Structure, Security
• The blockchain as a distributed ledger
• The UTXO (Unspend Transaction Amount)
• Other blockchain services
• Foundations of State Machine Replication: fault-tolerance, single points of failure, determinism, transition function
• The consensus protocol
• Byzantine failure
• Double-spending risk and proof-of-work
• From game theory to the reality of mining
• Prices and “monetary policy” for cryptocurrencies.
• The different coins: analysis for Investors. BTC vs Bitcoin Cash, Ether, Monero, Iota, BitShares…
• The Bitcoin debate. Understanding the scalability curse and the solutions (Payment Channels, Lightning…)
• Beyond mining: proof-of-stake and delegated proof-of-stake
• The concrete possibility of BitDollar, EuroCoin or BitOfEngland: a central bank cryptocurrency
• Settlement coins: banks from money creation to management
• Transforming payments. From Paypal, Apple Pay… to the Ripple™ model
• How to design escrow and business services: Multisig and nLockTime
• First solutions for trade finance: digitalize and disintermediate the business
• Interaction with IoT applications and AI algorithms
• The risks: hacking, privacy, key security
• From paper to digital contracts
• Understanding smart contracts: the robot executes the contract
• Szabo and Ricardian contracts
• Ethereum: how it works, Virtual Machine, accounts
• Ethereum smart contracts
• What to learn from TheDAO hack
• Other smart contract solutions
• R3 CEV’s CORDA, the distributed ledger for financial contracts
• IBM Fabric for global business applications
• HyperLedger project for interoperability
• Private and Enterprise Ethereum solutions
• The new ICO challengers: EOS, TEZOS
• The old consensus by reconciliation model and its costs
• Too much trust: slow transactions, costly duplication, opacity, litigations
• The risk consequences: operational risk, credit risk and capital requirements
• Can we really apply “Blockchain Technology” to these problems?
• Removing hidden trust in business steps
• Shared accounting on a DLT
• More efficient automation through smart contracts
• Cryptosecurity to go beyond centralization
• Impacts on fintech: derivatives, trade finance…
• Post-trading workflow
• Trade finance and letters of credit
• Supply Chain and IoT
• Securities: bonds and equity
• DLT for T+0 and Smart Contracts for riskless simultaneous deliveries and payments
• Using the ledgers for voting rights
• From Coloured Coins to Ricardian Contracts
• Order-books, exchanges and decentralized exchanges
• Impact on the other players in DLT world: trade repositories, custodians, CCPs
• Focus on CCPs: replacing them or improving them?
• Variation and initial margin. The issue of reconciliation
• The margin period of risk and the default closeout. The consequences of opacity
• The regulatory response: SIMM, CCPs, capital regulations
• The CVA/DVA, FVA and capital costs of imperfect collateral
• Smart CSA Contract for the variation and initial margin
• The workflow on a distributed ledger
• Smart contract automation to reduce risk and capital. Role of regulators
• Netting automated algorithms
• The issue of the Valuation Oracle
• Bringing data into the Blockchain
• Shelling Point. The Markit Totem™ model
• TLS for communication between different networks and Intel SGX for cloud computing in private networks
• Data providers for DLT. The future of data in DLT
• The current process. The issues of traceability and transparency
• The incremental DLT business cases: digitization, disintermediation, automation
• Digital bills of lading and proofs. The tri-party smart contracts for buyers, suppliers and carriers
• The financial legs: letters of credit and accounts receivable purchases
• Issues: integrating with legacy systems, and the view of regulators, governments and banks
• The first regulations made on cryptocurrencies. The opinion of regulators
• The existing regulations that are restraining technological innovation
• How accounting and legal would be impacted
• Which regulations could adapt to increased automation and transparency
• The natural next step after permissionless money: permissionless securities
• How to make a crypto fund. How to diversify: cryptos, apps in startups. The mixed proposal of ICOs
• The slippery legal foundations and the original idea: give property rights through technology and not through legal enforcement.
• How tokens are issued. The types of tokens, the legal aspects, the selling strategies..
• Analyzing famous ICOs in details: from Ethereum to EOS via Gnosis, Tezos, Bancor, Parity…. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Microsoft believes blockchain is a transformational technology with the ability to significantly reduce the friction of doing business, especially streamlining business processes shared across multiple organizations.
