Blockchain and Money

15.S12 Blockchain and Money is a graduate course from the MIT Sloan School of Management, taught by Gary Gensler in fall 2018 and published on OpenCourseWare with video of each session. It is aimed at students who want to understand how blockchain technology might be used, by entrepreneurs and by incumbents, to change money and finance. The course opens with a review of Bitcoin and the commercial, technical and public policy fundamentals of blockchain, distributed ledgers and smart contracts, then examines current and potential applications in the financial sector. The session list starts with money, ledgers and Bitcoin, blockchain basics covering cryptography, consensus, transactions and script code, smart contracts and dApps, technical challenges, public policy and permissioned systems.

It then turns to the financial system: blockchain economics, assessing use cases, payments, central and commercial banking, secondary markets and crypto exchanges, primary markets, ICOs and venture capital, post-trade clearing and settlement, trade finance and supply chain, and digital identity. Besides the videos you get lecture slides, readings, recommended books, study questions and the written assignments. The materials are free under a Creative Commons licence, with no account and no certificate; the syllabus notes that MIT students needed the instructor's permission to enrol, but there are no prerequisites for watching online.