International Blockchain School, 2022

The fifth International Blockchain School (Winter Edition) will be held at IT University of Copenhagen on the 24th-28th of January 2022.

The theme is Sustainable Decentralized Finance.

The longevity of distributed business models is dependent on economic and ecological sustainability. The aim of the International Blockchain School is to develop innovative ideas to generate sophisticated financial services for networked business models in an eco-friendly and durable way.

Description
Increasingly, start-ups in the Fintech, TechFin and DeFi sectors focus on DLT-based innovations to provide new financial services to private or corporate clients.

Those innovations primarily promise better and more affordable solutions while guaranteeing transparency, high execution quality, and audibility. This will change financial business models and the financial market itself. Some examples are:

• * New payment services for international money transfer.
• * Better access to capital markets for SMEs.
• * Programmable solutions to settle transactions autonomously.
• * Intelligent wallets that act on behave of their owners.
• * Decentralized exchanges that allow nearly instant trading.
• * New types of on-ledger data analytics.
• * Smarter integration of seamless taxation.
• * New shared ownership models of digital or digitized assets.

Tracks
Together with our partnering organizations, we have arranged use cases for hackathons and makathons, where students in close cooperation with the case-giving organizations will create innovative sustainable decentralized finance solutions.

The course will be held over five days. There will be three parallel tracks in which the students will work:

• 1) In track one (explorer track), students with basic prior blockchain experience will work together with case organisations from the industry and public sector on developing blockchain prototypes in a hackathon.

• 2) Track two (exploiter track) is geared towards students with advanced knowledge around blockchain prototyping to work with organisations which already have prototypes developed. In this hackathon, demonstrators are further improved or designed anew.

• 3) In track three technical issues in existing Blockchain / DLT systems are discussed and potential solutions are developed. This is a makerthon, where not necessarily code is written, but where potential solutions are developed conceptually.

Objectives
PhD and master students will learn how blockchain technology disrupts existing business models and gain insights into paradigmatic changes from economic, organizational, and computer science viewpoints. They will learn to analyze existing business processes and how blockchain-based solutions have the potential to disrupt them. In so doing, they will be able to co-create new blockchain-based systems, considering both cryptographic and economic aspects.

Once basic blockchain elements have been introduced, participants will work on their own blockchain development projects, supported by the participating industry partners. The students will learn how to set up a development environment and how to work with proven platforms such as Ethereum, Algorand, NEO and others. They will be able to design and implement their own smart contracts and will code their own decentralized applications.

The outcomes will be functioning demonstrators, as well as a written documentation and reports that illustrate the business process or mechanism realized in a blockchain implementation and how, in so doing, a real-world challenge is addressed.

Academic credits
PhD Students can receive 6 ECTS after successfully passing the exam.

Independently, all participants will receive a certificate that they have participated in the International Blockchain School.

Exam
Participants will present their blockchain solutions at the end of the International Blockchain School and defend these.

In addition, they will produce a 15-page report after the course and/or write a paper that is to be submitted to an academic outlet, such as a conference or journal, coached by the International Blockchain School organizers.

The presentation, report, as well as the working paper, are mandatory deliverables and after they have been assessed at a satisfactory level, the ECTS points will be granted and a certificate issued.

Admission
The number of participants in the International Blockchain School is limited and we accept applications on an ongoing basis. Interested students are encouraged to apply early. See more information here: How to Apply.

Thanks
The International Blockchain School is an initiative of the European Blockchain Center and is run jointly for the fifth year by faculty members from IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen University, and the University of the Faroe Islands.

The International Blockchain School would not be possible without the generous support of Our Partners.

Our Partners