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YBlockchain? Episode 005: Decentralizing the Financial System: Innovation and Regulation

Thursday, Sep 30 2021 at 12:30 - 1:30 pm EDT

Yblockchain croppedBlockchain technology has begun to decentralize financial market infrastructure by enabling peer-to-peer transactions, and we are only in the early days.  DeFi (short for Decentralized Finance) has exploded in the last year, with a series of community-driven applications that provide new protocols for trading, lending, insurance, and other financial services powered smart contracts.  These automated applications have become the backbone for a truly global financial network, but not without risks.  At an institutional level, the DTCC has announced a blockchain solution to shorten settlement times.  How do these systems relate to existing regulations?  What would this mean for the global economy?  Join us for a conversation on the latest trends.

Join us on Thursday, September 30th from 12:30 – 1:30pm for a conversation on the latest trends in blockchain. Moderated by Diana Barrero Zalles ‘17, experts  Tim Swanson, Head of Market Intelligence at Clearmatics; Founder & Director of Post Oak Labs and Alexis Goldstein, Financial Policy Director, Open Markets Institute, will discuss, “Decentralizing the Financial System: Innovation and Regulation.”

Open to the public. Register to attend.

Follow us on Twitter (@YaleICF) and join the discussion! #YaleBlockchain

Watch the recording:
 

Speakers

  • Alexis Goldstein

    Financial Policy Director, Open Markets Institute

    Alexis Goldstein is a financial regulatory expert and former Wall Street professional. She previously worked on financial regulatory policy, climate finance, consumer and investor protection, and higher education for Americans for Financial Reform. Goldstein is also an advisory board member for the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School. Prior to working in advocacy, Goldstein spent seven years working on Wall Street as a programmer at Morgan Stanley in electronic trading, and as a business analyst at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank in equity derivatives. She acted as a product manager for the trading and risk management software used by the global equity options flow trading desks. She also worked as a co-organizer and teacher for Girl Develop It in New York, a group that conducts low-cost programming classes for women, and has written two web programming books, including co-authoring “HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World”. Goldstein has been published widely, including in The New York Times, is a frequent guest on cable news, including MSNBC, CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, CNN, and HBO’s Realtime with Bill Maher, and was featured in PBS Frontline’s “Money, Power, and Wall Street” documentary.

  • Tim Swanson

    Head of Market Intelligence, Clearmatics; Founder & Director, Post Oak Labs

    Tim Swanson is the founder and director of research at Post Oak Labs and Head of Market Intelligence at Clearmatics. He is also the creator of the Tau Protocol. He was previously a visiting research fellow at the Singapore University of Social Sciences as well as at Sim Kee Boon Institute at Singapore Management University. He worked in East Asia for more than six years and is currently based in the US. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University. His 2015 paper: “Consensus-as-a-service: a brief report on the emergence of permissioned, distributed ledger systems” popularized the term “permissioned” blockchain (or ledger), a topic which remains a mainstay at fintech conferences globally. He is the author of three books: "Great Wall of Numbers: Business Opportunities and Challenges in China," "Great Chain of Numbers: A Guide to Smart Contracts, Smart Property and Trustless Asset Management," and "The Anatomy of a Money-like Informational Commodity: A Study of Bitcoin." He is currently an advisor to Elm Labs. And was an advisor to Blockseer (acquired by DMG), and to Hyperledger (acquired by Digital Asset). He does not own any cryptocurrencies in any of the companies or projects he has written about, nor has he received financial compensation for including companies or projects within his articles. He was previously the Director of Market Research at R3. His research papers have been cited in a variety of media and has appeared on more than one hundred industry panels and events over the past six years. He is also frequently quoted in media including: Wired, MIT Technology Review, Reuters, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New Republic, American Banker, and International Business Times.

  • Diana Barrero Zalles '17

    Moderator & Organizer

    Diana Barrero Zalles is Director of ESG & Climate Tech at Emergents @ Weild & Co., advancing investment banking at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets with a focus on cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and climate tech. She is also co-author of the book Transparency in ESG and the Circular Economy: Capturing Opportunities Through Data, which discusses the importance of environmental, social, and governance issues in today’s connected world, and the role of emerging technologies to uphold sustainability. Diana founded and currently runs a blockchain discussion forum at the International Center for Finance of the Yale School of Management and is a Forbes contributor on digital assets, having published industry research on stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, market integrity for crypto trading platforms, and decentralized financial market infrastructure. She also advised the Parliament of Cyprus to establish a regulatory framework for digital assets and AML/CFT risk assessment. Previously, Diana managed cross-border transactions with the investment banking offices of the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC. She is an alumna of the University of Notre Dame and has an MBA from Yale. She was born in Bolivia and is a native Spanish and English speaker.

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