Blockchain 101

Blockchain technologies are coming back into the spotlight for good reasons.

On the one hand, the EU will soon enact its long-awaited “Markets in Crypto-Assets” (MiCA) regulation which gives legitimacy to the most popular blockchain applications, the crypto-assets. Large institutional actors are expected to enter the new economic domain that this legislation opens up, which should reveal new problems to solve and create new blockchain related jobs and opportunities.

On the other hand, the vast developments in AI in the past years threaten to upend our societies by tearing at the fabric of trust on which human interaction is built. With AI becoming more capable of imitating human output by the day, we will soon have trouble telling the truth apart from fabrication. As the “trust machine”, blockchain is ideally positioned to be the essential ingredient in future applications that will tame potentially “runaway, rogue AI”

The course is designed for a broad audience of professionals looking to acquire a solid general understanding of blockchain technologies and their potential impact going forward. The course aims to provide the intellectual tools needed to assess various blockchain technologies and their suitability for solving a spectrum of business problems both in established contexts (big organisations) and in innovative settings (start-ups).

The aim of this course is to understand the issues, opportunities and challenges related to the development of Web3, and thus allow you to decipher the trends and get to grips with the key concepts in order to start to think about. We will also go into detail on the different components of the Web3, that make it so attractive. A focus on success stories and a business case will be done during the session.

The course gives a broad introduction to the legal framework around blockchain and guides the participants through an understanding of what is authorized, respectively regulated or prohibited when using the blockchain (in Luxembourg and in Europe). At the end of the course, the participant will have acquired a foundational understanding of the blockchain legal environment.

Blockchain is one the latest buzzwords in the world of technology. Often associated with cryptocurrencies, is it what it really seems? Do you really know what is behind blockchain? What constitutes the ecosystem? This course will review and correct the misconceptions regarding blockchain technology.

The course will first describe how Ethereum smart contracts and DApps can be developed. This will involve Solidity, ERC20/721 and development tools as well as some DeFi applications. Then, we will discuss the motivations behind the Merge and what the Ethereum blockchain looks like before and after the Merge. We will conclude with a roadmap that includes projects to address MEV, scalability, and privacy issues, for instance, with zero-knowledge proofs.

This course will present the best use cases in asset tokenisation, be it financial, non-financial, assets. For each of these use cases, practical applications will be presented and illustrated with players from the ecosystem. We will share the basics of tokenisation and real life examples, providing another application of the blockchain/DLT technology and its use, and providing information about players from the ecosystem