Events

Seminar Series

FDCI holds Seminar Series, joint events with the Center for Blockchain Research. Please visit the CBR's website for a full list of that group's speakers. Below are the dates and names of the speakers FDCI will be hosting for this series. All presentations will be virtual through Zoom until Fall of 2021, at which point we will look to hold events on campus. 

Geoff RamseyerStanford Computer Science PhD Student

Wednesday, June 9th, 2021 from 3-4pm PDT, Zoom

Geoff will present his research on a novel design of an on-chain, highly scalable, decentralized exchange. The key design insight is to use an Arrow-Debreu exchange market structure that fixes the valuation of assets for all trades in a given block of transactions. This prevents frontrunning attacks that would otherwise increase the bid-ask spread for small traders, eliminates internal arbitrage opportunities, and improves liquidity between traditionally illiquid currency pairs. It also makes trade operations commutative, and thus effectively parallelizable.

David Jevans, CipherTrace

Wednesday, May 26th, 2021 from 3-4pm PDT, Zoom

"Blockchain analytics and forensics: how it works, what we learn from it, and how it can inform regulators."

Xochitl Cazadorand Tim Moretonof Celo

Wednesday, May 19th, 2021 from 3-4pm PDT, Zoom
 
During this session, Xochitl and Tim will dive deep into field research that helped shape how the Celo platform and applications were designed and highlight use cases where blockchain is being adopted to lead efforts like Universal Basic Income, MicroWork and P2P Lending. 

Professor Kevin Werbach, Wharton School

"Decentralized Finance: A Toolkit for Policy-Makers"

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021 from 3-4pm PDT, Zoom

Blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) services grew from under $1 billion to $40 billion in locked digital assets during 2020. Is DeFi the killer app for decentralized applications and governance, the future of global finance, or a catastrophe waiting to happen? Or perhaps all of the above? Based on reports developed with the World Economic Forum, this presentation will highlight:

1.  What exactly is DeFi?

2.  Distinctive risks that regulators should be concerned about

3.  Policy approaches to promote innovation while preventing harms