Andreas Park PRO
Professor of Finance at UofT
Instructors: Andreas Park & Zissis Poulos
Rotman – MBA
5-minute version:
What is a blockchain?
blockchain=
an infrastructure for digital resource transfers
5-minute version:
What is a cryptocurrency?
cryptocurrency =
internal payment mechanism to pay for operation of a blockchain
5-minute version:
What is Decentralized Finance?
decentralized finance =
provision of financial services without the necessary involvement of a traditional financial intermediary based on blockchain technology
in practice: new financial infrastructure that will be a common resource
payments
stocks, bonds, and options
swaps, CDS, MBS, CDOs
insurance contracts
\(\vdots\)
Source: Harvey, Ramachandran, and Santoro (2020)
\(\Rightarrow\) Can we decentralize finance?
Partnerships
Nokia's market shares for devices:
What happened and can it happen to banks?
What did they pay for?
What do people value?
If banks move all data into "the cloud," why do we need banks?
Siloed banks
Cloud computing and cloud storage
Open banking and open data
The past (and the present?)
The present and near future
3-5 years in the future
5-10 years in the future
Platforms?
Banks?
Tech firms?
Silos vs Common Infrastructures
Change ledger entry locally
Sue's bank transfers from Sue's account to Bob's bank's account
Bob's bank transfers from its account to Bob's account
Sue's bank transfers from Sue's account to its own account
Bob's bank transfers from its account to Bob's account
Central Bank
Central bank transfers from Sue's bank's account to Bob's bank's account
Sue's bank transfers from Sue's account to its own account
Bob's bank transfers from its account to Bob's account
use the Swift network of correspondent banks
very complex
many parties
lots of frictions and points of failure
very expensive
How does it all work and why?
A deep dive into the "How?"
Cryptography: only Sue can spend her money
Problem: double-spending
How can we trust that
Contains transaction from Sue to Bob
Question: Can Sue rewrite history?
Where to add a new block B7?
Contains transaction from Sue to Bob
Sue wants to undo the transaction by rewriting history with B6
Sue's objective
What does it take?
How does Proof of Work prevent this?
Back of the envelope calculation
Double spend attack prevention
Basic idea of competitive equilibrium
aggregate mining cost = aggregate reward
Double spending attack
condition that prevents it
(Chiu & Koeppl RFS 2018)
How do you agree though that something happened, or, what is consensus?
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Equilibrium
Blockchain requirement
= 00000xd4we...
= 00000xd4we...
= 00000xd4we...
consensus is reached if hash starts with right number of leading zeros
Challenges
Source: Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index https://cbeci.org/
Root Problem
Solutions
https://blog.stephantual.com/what-are-state-channels-32a81f7accab
Transaction Processing
Disclaimer: token design strongly influenced by yours truly
going back to Budish (2018)
Serial Chain
Conflux Chain
In Conflux, withholding a block leads to greater anti-cone size
Intuition: Anticone = blocks created without properly referencing others blocks in its vicinity
Where to add a new block B7?
My personal problem: I have not yet seen a convincing theoretical model of PoS
economic result: Fahad Saleh (2021) Review of Financial Studies, "Blockchain Without Waste: Proof-of-Stake" shows that PoS is an equilibrium
current state:
transactions per second | T per 12 hours (business day) | |
---|---|---|
Bitcoin | 7 | 302,400 |
Ethereum | 30 | 1,296,000 |
Algorand | 2000 | 86,400,000 |
Conflux | 4000 | 172,800,000 |
Athereum | 5000 | 216,000,000 |
Payments Canada ACSS | 648 | 28,000,000 |
US retail | 7639 | 330,000,000 |
Canada number of equity trades | 46 | 2,000,000 |
Orders on Canadian equity markets | 3588 | 155,000,000 |
Tweaks: lighting network (BTC) or side chains, SegWit, blocksize possible, but there are limits
microtransactions, IoT, and other smart contract use cases place very high demands
What can it for finance, what are problems and obstacles?
Sue wants to sell ABX
Bob wants to buy ABX
sell order
buy order
Clearing House
Stock Exchange
Broker
Broker
3rd party tech
custodian
custodian
record beneficial ownership
central bank for payment
Evolution
vs
"Let me just say how impressed I am with Ethereum...If Bitcoin is email ––a one-trick pony, so to speak, but obviously revolutionary–– Ethereum goes far beyond that; it's more like the Internet...The whole idea of DeFi really is, number one, it’s obviously revolutionary, and I think at the end of the day could lead to a massive disintermediation of the financial system and the traditional players."
Heath P. Tarbert, CFTC Chairman, October 2020
moving value (remittances)
digital money: real-time settlement, reduced reserves
tokenization of assets
automization of contract payments
securitization
systems and infrastructure reorganization
digital identity
new forms of financial contracts, assets, and forms of financing
Private Sector Solutions
Who gets to update?
Can a higher body prevent
transactions?
Can the past be altered?
consensus
immutability
censorship resistence
open to anyone
no one can be excluded
past cannot be changed
high visibility of transactions
open-access eco-system
slow governance
privacy only at a cost
joint control and governance
straightforward KYC and AML
tech support
transaction secrecy simpler
rely on corporate development
compliance with law (reversion)
can keep competition out
Enter BigTech
cellphone data from 2018 (NewZoo), inflation from 2020 (World Population Review)
Evolution
DIEM = "new financial infrastructure"
They have ZERO interest in becoming a financial institution/bank
\(\rightarrow\) no expertise
\(\rightarrow\) competitive market
\(\rightarrow\) one of the most regulated business environments
They are trying to deal with frictions that impede their business
They aim to collect data which will vastly improve their business
Lay the groundwork for the next step of the digital evolution: the "Metaverse"
5-minute version:
Finance, Metaverse, and Non-Fungible Tokens
metaverse =
marriage of the digital and physical world
sale price: $69,000,000
What is an NFT?
Why bother with an NFT?
Metaverse application
Related Development: Central Bank-Issued Digital Currencies
Evolution
CBDCs
Source: CBDCTracker.org
Risks and open problems
Investor
Broker
Venue
Settlement
Exchange
Wholeseller
Darkpool
Internalizer
Venue
Settlement
Investor
On chain
Technology
Legal/Regulation
Economic functions
interoperability
cybersecurity and privacy
functionality
scalability
smart contract features and verification
space constraints
interoperability
scalability
space constraints:
Does the law have to change to accommodate new tech? If so, how? What's dated, what's not?
Legal setup of a platform: what rules can, should, and must a platform establish? What regulations are necessary?
How can token design and the law be married?
What is the economic impact of "tokenizing everything"?
How will it affect investments and investment banking?
Which business opportunities will it enable?
What do tokens and "alternative money" mean for payments?
Who gets to update?
Can a higher body prevent
transactions?
Can the past be altered?
consensus
immutability
censorship resistence
open to anyone
no one can be excluded
past cannot be changed
high visibility of transactions
open-access eco-system
slow governance
privacy only at a cost
joint control and governance
straightforward KYC and AML
tech support
transaction secrecy simpler
rely on corporate development
compliance with law (reversion)
can keep competition out
Crypto vs Money
store of value?
unit of account?
method of exchange?
store of value?
unit of account?
method of exchange?
funding figures from Nov 2018; source: blockchain.com
issued by a consortium of firms (e.g., Facebook, Mastercard) and not for profits (Creative Destruction Lab)
each coin will be backed by a basket of SIX fiat currencies
idea is conceptually similar to IMF Special Drawing Rights (pegged to USD, EUR, YEN, GBP, YUAN)
Would you use Libra/Money issue by Tech Firm?
If we ask explicitly for Facebook vs Tech Firm
Scaled to yes/maybe/no. About 20% say: "Need more info"
Data: coinschedule
for comparison: total size of
Toronto Stock Exchange: $2,200B
Toronto Venture Exchange: $41B
Source: Tokendata
Source: Satis Group LLC
Source: Morgan Stanley (Nov 2018) “Update: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain”
Source: Tokendata
Lessons?
can finance projects that otherwise would find no debt or equity funding
enable network effects and new business opportunities
allows entrepreneurs to extract more surplus
can finance projects that otherwise would find no debt or equity funding
FinTech
DeFi
innovation vs. salesmanship
main focus
blockchain is a transformative technology, but won't be used in practice overnight
many conceptual and technological challenges remain, but there are already various areas of application
legal, regulatory, and competitive changes are needed and then the opportunities are endless ...
it will open up the banking world further, foster international competition, and change how we pay and exchange value
My view: business development will happen in private/semi-public space; strong increase in recent activity; no more testing but re-engineering of processes.
@financeUTM
andreas.park@rotman.utoronto.ca
slides.com/ap248
sites.google.com/site/parkandreas/
youtube.com/user/andreaspark2812/
By Andreas Park
This is the slide deck that I use for a quick introduction to the Decentralized Finance class.