Decentralized Finance(Defi) Opportunities & Risks

Introduction

Decentralized Finance (Defi) Opportunities & Risks course focus on decentralized finance. The course starts with the premise that an analysis of any new technology must clearly gauge the risks and challenges.

This course is a framework to evaluate DeFi risk; Environmental implications of cryptocurrency; and winners and losers in the future of finance. DeFi is at its nascent stage, there are lots of opportunities and risks accompanying it. The course begins with the most obvious risk: smart contract risk. Smart contracts are foundational for DeFi.

The code of these contracts is public – opening a clear attack vector for hackers. That is, in traditional finance, hackers need to break into a system to get access to the code and data. In DeFi, everything is open source. There are many other risks studied including: Governance risk; Oracle risk; Scaling risk; Decentralized Exchange or DEX risk; Custodial risk; Environmental risk; and Regulatory risk.

Course Objective

At the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Understanding smart contract risk
• Different approaches to custody
• Ethereum 2.0 approaches to scaling
• Mechanics and risks of decentralized exchange
• Assessing regulatory risk

COURSE OUTLINE

MODULE 1: Smart Contract Risk

• Understanding smart contract rist
• The Characteristics of smart contract risk
• Logic errors and economic exploits
• The Yearn finance exploit that utilized a massive flash loan.

MODULE 2: Governance, DNS, Oracle, DEX and Custodial Risk

• Exploring Governance attacks
• Exploring DNS attacks
• Understanding oracle vulnerabilities
• The DEX risk
• Custodial Approach Types & The Underlying Risks

MODULE 3: The Role Of DeFi Insurance & Underlying Risks

• Overview about DeFi Insurance
• Variations of DeFi Insurance
• Wallet Insurance
• Smart Contract Cover
• Lending Insurance

MODULE 4: Scaling Risk

• DeFi & Scaling risk
• Visa network
• Current capacity of the Ethereum blockchain
• Potential solutions to the scaling problem.

MODULE 5: The Environmental & Regulatory Aspect

• The Opportunities of Decentralizing Finance
• Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Policy-Maker Toolkit
• The regulatory risk that the DeFi space faces from KYC/AML
• The potential declaration that some DeFi tokens are securities
• Central bank digital currencies
• Environmental impact of Proof of Work consensus
• Winners and Losers

Who Should Attend?

Delivery Method: This will include combine lectures, discussions, group exercises, case studies and illustrations. Participants will also understand the theoretical and practical knowledge of the topic.

Venue: Rwanda

Fee: Open

Duration: 1 week

Course Date: February 26th – 1st March 2024