DLT Geek

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 course gives a broad introduction to Blockchain principles and programming and guides the participants through a first hands-on Blockchain and decentralized application programming experience in the Ethereum Blockchain environment.

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.

Why are ZKPs increasingly used in many blockchain applications? With this course participants will learn why ZKPs can be considered a key technology without which blockchain can hardly scale towards mainstream adoption. Learners will gain insights into how ZKPs are relevant in machine learning, IT security, and get help in combating misinformation in future centralized or decentralized information systems.

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 demonstrate Web3 methods in practice. Participants will gain practical knowledge of blockchain's main concepts, such as smart contract characteristics and interaction with smart contracts via Web3 methods. We will explore the power of Web3 methods (using Web3.js) and conceptualizing it with real-world applications. At the end of the course, the participants acquire a foundational understanding of Web3 methods and blockchain programming.

In this course, we will describe the needed steps to tokenize a financial instrument. How to define a use case, understand the legal considerations and how to address the technical challenges. We will also do a practical exercise by creating and issuing a token in a sandbox environment.