Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence at Berkeley

With a ton of new projects in the pipeline, new parachains will continue rolling out over the next year and beyond, and existing parachains will continue building on their recent successes, rolling out new technologies and onboarding a new wave of Web3 end-users. Centralized exchanges have proven themselves to be a security risk to users in recent years, while their decentralized counterparts , have been held back by slow speeds and high fees. Interlay’s decentralized Bitcoin-backed asset, iBTC, turns BTC into a secure multichain asset. To this day, Bitcoin remains the most popularly-held crypto asset in the world.

We will discuss the systemic risks stemming from Miner Extractable Value and how MEV can be minimized by design. Decentralized governance provides power to a pseudonymous collective, and we will explore how governance works, and how it may be attacked. Students will be completing an open-ended research project culminating in a presentation and a workshop-style paper submitted at the end of the semester. You will choose an area of research in DeFi that you wish to explore and are encouraged to read related papers in that area. You will then identify an area that you believe needs improvement or merits further research and build systems and/or conduct GMT experiments to further the state of the art within your chosen field. Students are welcome to choose their own topics, but we’ll also provide a list of topic suggestions that you can take inspiration from if you wish.

Finance & Strategy Manager – Cash App Marketing

Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator incubates crypto-economics and blockchain technology use cases at the University of California, Berkeley. This series amplifies authentic voices and spreads information with integrity. This industry has world-changing implications for the better, however, it is fraught with misinformation and speculation spurred by pay-to-play marketing.

Sound must also be processed, modified from its recorded state to fit the context of the music. As always, everything said here is all my opinion and experience only and I’m not alleging any facts, casting any aspersions, or giving any advice. Once again, collaboration was the name of the game and even I was able to assist other students on Discord (per the instructors’ request/instructions and appreciation for those that helped IMO) and was a somewhat leading voice on Discord.

ST Platform We provide low-barrier creative tools, an AI-powered content network with tokenization of copyright to create, share, and commercialize 3D interactive content. Comidacoins Transparent transactions for users to know where their funds are being used directly and ability to utilize crypto to purchase necessary goods. SoPact Social Impact Platform Empowering social agency through crypto, connecting donors with doers.

A comprehensive introduction covering a computer science and finance background required for the remainder of the course. We will discuss the basics of decentralized systems, permissionless berkeley defi blockchains, consensus, smart contracts and contrast DeFi to traditional finance. DeFi liquidity today is spread out across multiple siloed blockchain networks.

Product Marketing Manager

We will also discuss various attempts at how to enforce data ownership, data monetization and valuation as well as controlled use and misuse of data. Web3 provides better incentive models and control to users over the networks they use, through https://www.beaxy.com/ powerful abstractions like smart contracts, NFTs, and DAOs. Replacing centralized platforms in web2 with open protocols and autonomous governance, web3 encourages community participation and has the potential to be the future of the Internet.

The purpose of this class is to bring together students and interdisciplinary experts in Computer Science and Finance to discuss the emerging area of Decentralized Finance . DeFi has experienced an unprecedented growth, with hundreds of projects and a countless stream of financial, distributed systems, and blockchain innovations. The total value locked in decentralized finance — a measure of the total value of assets committed to the DeFi ecosystem — has reached over $80 billion.

Making the shift from designing products to designing experiences

In many cases, smart contracts are able to automatically apply any proposed changes. Changes are able to be proposed, vetted, and voted on through on-chain governance and accessed by using governance tokens. In other cases, changes are applied by the team maintaining the project or by someone hired to do so.

And heeeeeeere coooooome the white papers… on exactly how government should deal with the rise of generative AI. More concerning for U.S. regulators may be the capacity of the second-largest crypto network to adjust its structure to evade their reach. Coincidentally or not, the percentage of new compliant blocks began slipping below 50 percent last Monday, around the same time Tether was experiencing its dramatic spike in usage, according to the Labrys data. In a Telegram exchange with DFD, One of the activists, Berlin-based DeFi developer Martin Köppelmann, attributed much of the decline to the creation of new block-building services that ignore Treasury’s blacklist.

Why Every Marketer Needs the Power of SQL: an Interview with Fareed Mosavat (former Director of Product at Slack)

We study the fundamental value pricing relationship for nontraditional assets, for which yields and rare event crash risk are unobservable, and not well understood. We introduce a novel test for deviations from fundamental value pricing for such assets. Simulations show that our test performs well for some benchmark examples that bubble tests based on unit roots or explosive behavior may find hard to handle. For traditional stocks and stock indexes, our test typically does not detect bubbles. When applied to cryptocurrencies, our test suggests suggests the presence of a bubble for multiple large cryptocurrencies at risk adjusted discount rates up to 25% per year, and even at 50% per year.

More importantly, the teaching staff were adept at being able to “land the plane” for all students while being quite fair to the various skill levels, effort, and achievements of various students IMO. Having this number of elite professors teaching this course allowed a broad range and depth of subject matter. First, let’s go through a basic setup for the course and what my experience was below. This course is primarily designed for PhD students and PhD students may take it for credit or audit. Master’s and undergraduate students with permission may take it for credit or audit. The final report should be within 6 page with additional appendix and references as needed .

A common theme of asset management tools are accessibility, tracking ecosystems in order to make interactions and asset movement easy, safe and transparent. While some projects actively hold capital, others only track and manage capital that is spread across other platforms. Powered by blockchains, Decentralized Finance has grown to a significant economy covering exchanges, borrowing/lending, margin trading, derivatives, and more. However, the security of DeFi have to date not received much scrutiny or attention. Indeed, both old (buggy smart contracts, key management failures, etc.) and new security problems (bribery attacks, MEV, etc.) rampage and have cost billions of dollars in loss. At the end of 2022, Centrifuge received the largest on-chain investment into RWA in the history of blockchain.

the future in 5 links

As a participant you may notice a bit more reading content and a little less video/lecture content… For information about future offering of the DeFi course, please join the berkeley- mailing list. We welcome papers of up to 6 pages, excluding references and bibliographies, in the double column ACM CCS format. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that one of the authors will register and present the paper at the workshop.

For Ethereum, extremely high risk adjusted discount rates, above 71% per year, are needed for our test to fail to reject the no-bubble null hypothesis. For Stellar, the null is rejected even at the very high risk adjusted discount rate of 100% per year. The Zero Knowledge podcast is by far the best podcast for learning about the technical underpinnings of the blockchain technology. Although it focuses on applications related to Zero Knowledge, it covers a broad range of topics outside of Zero Knowledge as well.Epicenter is also quite good. Several key technologies are also in development for Polkadot, which will push the capabilities of parachains and dapps even further, including trustless interoperability with external networks with the rollout of XCM v3 and the Bridge Hub parachain. With everything that’s happening in the Polkadot ecosystem, 2023 is shaping up to be the biggest year yet for Web3 innovation.

• We study the fundamental value pricing relationship for nontraditional assets, for which yields and rare event crash risk are unobservable, and not well understood.
• CESC is hosted by Berkeley RDI, a multi-disciplinary campus-wide center, focusing on advancing the science, technology and education of web3, decentralization and empowering of a responsible digital economy.
• One question raised by the ongoing crypto crackdown is just how much power U.S. regulators can exert over public blockchain networks.
• In addition, 3 and 4 unit students will participate in a group project , aiming to develop new solutions or analyze existing solutions and real-world deployment in DeFi, including a significant implementation component for 4 unit students.
• Self-described as a “super dapp”, Parallel is a one-stop-shop for DeFi solutions.

For project presentation, each group needs to record a 3-min video to summarize the results and findings of the project and need to submit the video and slides . All quizzes are released in parallel with the corresponding lecture and will be due midnight the following Wednesday. The questions are all multiple-choice and there are usually at most 5 per quiz. All quizzes are released in parallel with the corresponding lecture and will be due midnight the following Tuesday. For general course content related questions, please join our edstem and discord.

In addition, 3 and 4 unit students will participate in a group project , aiming to develop new solutions or analyze existing solutions and real-world deployment in DeFi, including a significant implementation component for 4 unit students. If the submission reveals novel bugs or vulnerabilities , the authors must explain the steps they have taken or intend to take to fix these flaws in detail (e.g., by disclosing vulnerabilities to the vendors). If the submission includes personally identifiable information or other forms of confidential data, the same rules apply. At the time of writing there are several more parachains on Kusama than Polkadot, with parachains having begun their launch there about 6-months before Polkadot. Many teams maintain a parachain on both Polkadot and Kusama, using Kusama to battle-test new technologies before rolling out upgrades to their Polkadot mainnet.

• The ERC-20 token standard for fungible tokens, and the ERC-721 token standard for non-fungible tokens have become key parts of the blockchain ecosystem, and so it’s important to get a good handle on how they function.
• It uses blockchain to ensure that all parties involved in a transaction have their accounting records updated simultaneously, acting as a decentralized bookkeeping system.
• The company also received a notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission that the agency is considering taking action against the company under the theory that the token is an unregistered security.
• This infrastructure enables interoperable DeFi for developers to create cross-chain smart contracts for asset transfers and function calls between connected ecosystems.
• By utilizing blockchain and smart contract technologies, DeFi aims to provide a new platform for programmable, automated finance services that remove the reliance on central trust and intermediaries.
• Replacing centralized platforms in web2 with open protocols and autonomous governance, web3 encourages community participation and has the potential to be the future of the Internet.

Coinversation is a DeFi and cross-chain crowdfunding platform that began as a synthetic asset protocol and has grown to offer a broader range of DeFi and NFT services. Coinversation enables crowdfunding of projects and activities like humanitarian aid campaigns. Connecting real-world assets to on-chain ecosystems effectively has been a DeFi innovation-in-waiting as different solutions have gradually come to market but largely failed to achieve widespread adoption. The Acala team rolled out their suite of products in 2022 and emerged as one of the top performing DeFi parachains on Polkadot with over $200 million in TVL and a total of 70,000+ cross-chain transfers completed with other networks.

While I may be very smart and hold 3 graduate degrees from some of the best universities in the world, including Berkeley, and always love to constantly learn new things and expand my limits/abilities, I know what I don’t know, know my limits, and am no fool. Berkeley/Stanford comp sci, let alone DeFi/crypto programming IMO can be extremely-to-insanely challenging if you are not from that world/that level and not prepared, etc. Each week, we will have a guest speaker do an “Ask Me Anything” session to answer your questions about the DeFi topic we covered that week. We expect in-person or online attendance in at least 10 of the AMA sessions, and require each student to ask at least 3 questions to speakers over the course of the semester.

Questions should be posted to Edstem by the Sunday preceding each AMA. If you have a time conflict with another class or another reason you cannot attend, please fill out this form to request an exception. The PC member was in the last two years in the same company or university as a co-author berkeley defi of the submitted paper. Dan Robinson is a Research Partner and the Head of Research at Paradigm, focused on crypto investments and research into open-source protocols. Before Interstellar, Dan practiced as a litigation attorney at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. He earned a J.D.

Whenever a PC member or co-chair is in conflict with a paper, the PC member or co-chair must not review the paper nor have access to the reviews or discussions. Any other case in which the authors believe they have a dispute or conflict with a PC member, they must proactively explain the reason to the PC chairs, who will mark the conflict if necessary. As of the submission date, papers with incorrect or incomplete conflict of interest details will be automatically refused. When one of the program co-chairs is unable to decide on a paper, the other co-chair would become responsible. When all program co-chairs are in conflict, the paper will be delegated to a neutral committee member.