6th International Blockchain School

August 14. Deadline for registration: June 26

Organizer:

Prof. Dr. Roman Beck (ITU)

Lecturers:

Roman Beck (ITU), Peter Sestoft (ITU), Michel Avital (CBS), Alexandra Andhov (KU), Fritz Henglein (KU), Boris Düdder (KU), Stefan Voigt (KU)

Dates of the course:

August 14th – August 18th, 2023

Rooms:

Scroll Bar, Auditorium 0, Auditorium 4, and others

Course description:

Blockchain, or more accurately, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) build the fundamental infrastructure layer for creation and capturing of digital value in decentralized environments. Start-ups, large corporations, governments, and the European Union work on blockchain-based innovations, making the technology a key driver of the next generation Internet, the Internet of values, where even market failures of the past can be addressed and solved, such as in the case of protecting global public goods. 

Combining incentives with revenue streams to internalize externalities for better air, better oceans, better climate, is one of the central contributions of DLT for addressing this global challenge. Thus, a movement within Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is gaining increasing prominence, which is Regenerative Finance, or ReFi. 

Regenerative Finance aims to protect global public goods by collecting and verifying information as base of coordination (e.g., by monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV)), as well as creating new asset (e.g., through tokenization) and decentralized governance approaches (e.g., decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)). Regenerative Finance is a decentralized web3 and DLT movement that seeks to develop the financial means to implement economic concepts such as those of “economies of permanence”, “regenerative economy,” and “polycentricity” in the governance of natural resources. 

Despite its nascency, ReFi is very popular by investors and users. For example, the project Flowcarbon, a climate technology company focused on building market infrastructure for the voluntary carbon market space, recently raised $70M in venture capital funding led by a16z crypto (Flowcarbon, 2022). Similarly, the startup Celo, which raised $20M in October 2021, seeks now to become “the home” of ReFi (Celo, 2022). The KlimaDAO bootstrapped a community of over 37,000 members (KlimaDAO, 2022) with its $KLIMA token peaking at a price of 3,777$ in October 2021, and with a current price around 1.5$ in the beginning of 2023 (Coingecko, 2023), demonstrating the volatility in this nascent space. 

At the same time, incumbents are currently conducting assessments of the ReFi space with the expectation that new policies will result in early 2023 that clarify the extent to which incumbent registries will support tokenization (see e.g., the recent announcements by American Carbon Registry (ACR), the Gold Standard proposal to allow the creation of digital tokens for carbon credits and Verra’s public consultation on “Third-Party Crypto Instruments and Tokens”).

In this 6^th Blockchain School, organized by the European Blockchain Center, we will focus on bringing together academia, industry, and the public sector to jointly work on Decentralized Finance systems with special focus on ReFi. PhD students from different disciplines and different regions of the world will come to Copenhagen to co-create new ideas and develop solutions in close cooperation with partners from Copenhagen FinTech Lab, as well as industry partners and regulators from all over Europe.  

For this edition of the Blockchain School, we will establish three different tracks for the case work:

1. Explorer Track: In this track, technical issues in existing Blockchain / DLT systems are discussed and potential solutions are developed. This is a makeathon, where not necessarily code is written, but where potential solutions are developed conceptually.
2. Exploiter Track: In this track, we will offer the opportunity for students with prior experience around blockchain prototyping to work with organisations which have already prototypes developed. The intention is to further improve demonstrators, or design them anew, to meet the more advanced requirements and level of know-how among participating students as well as organisations.
3. Tech Track: students will work together with case organisations from industry and public sector on developing blockchain prototypes in a 24 hours hackathon. 

All students will be encouraged to further improve their work in form of academic papers. We will work on special issues and fast track options in leading journals to allow teams who would like to publish their results in academic outlets can submit their work.

Prerequisites:

Students interested in participating in the Blockchain School must be enrolled as PhD or master students in a computer science, information systems, engineering or other cognate programs at a university. 

At least introductory programming experience is a requirement for track 2. Advanced experience is required in track 3, while in track 1 a degree and research in computer science and blockchain is required.

Applicants must submit a CV, a motivation letter (1 page), as well as a proposal (specification or idea) of a blockchain-based application they wish to work on or would like to extend during participation in the Blockchain School. The proposal should be 2 pages at maximum.
As part of the admission process, the organizers will assess the quality of the submitted application material before finally accepting the participants. We encourage students to apply as a team and will prioritize proposals submitted by teams. Accepted Blockchain School participants must make themselves familiar with the teaching material made available before the Blockchain School starts.

Exam:

Participants will present their blockchain solutions at the end of the Blockchain School and defend their work. In addition, they will produce 15 pages of report after the Blockchain School and/or write a paper that is to be submitted to an academic outlet, such as conference or journal, coached by the PhD 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.

Credits:

6 ECTS

Number of hours the student is expected to use on the course:

• Participation: 56 hours (4 days 8 hour each and 24h hackathon on Thursday/Friday)
• Preparation: 36 hours (proposal writing, self-study, and preparation of mandatory material)
• Post-processing: 60 hours (finalizing the 15 pages report on the developed blockchain solution and writing a paper)

How to sign up: 

Deadline of registration: June 26^th.

Interested participants can sign up here: https://blockchainschool.eu/how-to-apply/.

Required information are first name, last name, e-mail address, mailing address, university, and background.