Elements of Decentralized Finance

Blockchains are digital platforms whose consistency and liveness are maintained by a decentralized set of participants. The combination of programmability, permissionless access and the financial nature of the underlying token (e.g., ETH in the Ethereum blockchain) has led to tremendous innovation in financial products on the blockchain, broadly covered under the rubric of decentralized finance or simply DeFi. The purpose of this course is to introduce these developments classified as "elements" of DeFi, from a computer science point of view. Periodic programming assignments provide a hands-on instruction to the technical material.