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).

Blockchain, permissions, applications, smart contracts, role of decentralisation

On completion of this training, participants will be able to:

• Break down how blockchains function, what are the roles of their functional elements and understand the concept of “design goal”.
  
• Explain notions of trust, value, money and credit and the role of institutions in society and economy.
  
• Explore the primary determinants of human cooperation in a game-theoretical framework and understand state-based and stateless collaboration, and argue how Blockchain alters the trust function in a society and economy.
  
• Describe the role of decentralisation in a Blockchain system and its consequences for consensus formation, governance and socio-economic transactions.
  
• Recognise how blockchains create and enforce property rights and enable the exchange of value, and enumerate the characteristics of decentralised Blockchain ledgers and what they enable for individuals, businesses, the economy, and society.
  
• Critique and respond to a broad spectrum of blockchain critiques, from the political to the economical.
  
• Use a variety of blockchain applications and explain the reason for their novelty.
  
• Argue the implications of digital wallets and decentralised digital identities and explain their connection with Blockchain.
  
• Recognise the possibilities of smart contracts and decentralised applications. 
• Distinguish the various existing blockchain technologies and summarise their differences.
  
• Associate blockchain design goals with existing business processes.
  
• Describe the potential benefits of Blockchain for public sector processes.
  
• Imagine and draw the design of essential applications that integrate Blockchain principles and characteristics and fulfill specific requirements.
  

To allow the participants to develop a broad understanding of blockchain technologies and their current applications from both a theoretical and a practical perspective.