Course Overview
UW’s crypto course is a popular elective for our Nicholas Center MBA students who want to stay ahead of the curve on emerging financial technologies. Finance 765 Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain and Digital Assets, taught by Brad Chandler, delves into the experimental and evolving landscape of digital assets. The course explores the specific financial use cases of Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) and compares these new solutions to traditional finance. The course covers everything from the underlying blockchain technology to DeFi swaps, lending, insurance and derivatives. With a new focus on DeFi, the course seeks to answer these fundamental questions:
- What are the financial use cases where DeFi provides a viable solution?
- How does the DeFi solution work?
- How does it compare to the corresponding traditional finance solutions?
- What does DeFi offer that is valuable relative to the traditional financial system? And to whom does the value accrue?
Conducted in seminar format, this course emphasizes active student engagement. Students are expected to participate in discussions, progressively refine their viewpoints and contribute to a collective analysis of these topics. The course culminates in a research project where students critically evaluate a DeFi project that sparks their interest.
Experiential Learning
In the Spring 2024, Brad Chandler partnered with Layer 3, a crypto educational platform, to provide students with hands-on experience with influential DeFi protocols. Layer 3 designed six quests for UW students to explore stable coins, swaps, borrowing, cross-chain bridges, liquidity provisioning and Layer 2 protocols. Students created unique crypto wallets and demonstrated their proficiency in navigating DeFi protocols and blockchains including Uniswap, Aave, Arbitrum, Polygon and Avalanche.
Featured to the left, are two screenshots from the Layer 3 quests tailored specifically for students in UW’s crypto course.
Student Testimonials
“The Layer 3 quests helped me access many of the DeFi platforms we discussed in class, like Aave and Uniswap. In a few easy steps, I deposited digital assets, took out a loan and quickly repaid it. And I could see the transparency benefits where every transaction is recorded to the blockchain.”
Goncha Muradli, Nicholas Center MBA graduate, Class of 2024
“I, like many other students in the class, had only interacted with crypto via centralized exchanges and only read about these DeFi protocols. Through the guidance Layer 3 offered, I executed a transaction on Uniswap and borrowed on Aave. It’s one thing to talk about DeFi conceptually and another to actually swap one token for another. It certainly crystallized how it all works and taught me how to utilize the DeFi ecosystem beyond HODLing tokens and just talking about it.”
Xander Kessler, Nicholas Center MBA graduate, Class of 2024.
Research Project: Top Student Perspectives
A key goal of the class is to provide a platform for students’ contribution to this space so the course culminates in a research project where students critically evaluate a DeFi project that sparks their interest. Each year Brad Chandler compiles the top student essay papers to showcase their learning and insights. A total of eight students were selected to be showcased in the “Top Student Perspectives on Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain and Digital Assets” for May 2024. Below is a list of the authors and topics:
- Analysis of Chainlink Price Feeds, by Bridget Wu
- dYdx and the Future of Decentralized Asset Exchange, by Charles Cavins Maloney
- Evaluating Systemic Risks and Inefficiencies in Decentralized Finance: A Case Study of the Compound Protocol by Rishit Mahajan
- Aave: Decentralized Lending in the Aftermath of 2008 by Julie Maduros, Ishan Aggarwal, and Christopher Bakken
- The Solana Ecosystem’s Growth Fuels Jupiter’s Rise to Becoming a Leading Decentralized Exchange Aggregator, by Nick Wong and Reza Mohammadi.
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