Innovation and Cryptoventures

3 credits · Fuqua School of Business

The central topic of the course is understanding blockchain technology and its application to decentralized finance or DeFi. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology with very special features such as immutability and a high level of security. The advantage of blockchain is that it provides a transactional or verification framework without the need for trust-ensuring central parties (e.g., banks). This reduces transaction costs and lowers the possibility of fraud. The work for the course consists primarily of readings and an entrepreneurial group project that is presented at the end of the course. In addition to discussing DeFi and other business applications of blockchain, the course covers some ground on necessary concepts from cryptography (hashing, digital signatures, public/private keys, ciphers, etc.). The course is interdisciplinary. This course is for Daytime MBA and Accelerated Daytime MBA students.