Hello, my name is Don Tapscott and welcome to this course, Blockchain, Crypto assets, and Decentralized Finance. Today, intermediaries establish trust in our economy. They control the movement, storage and allocation of money and assets. But the status quo is rife with inefficiencies. The problem starts with identity and billions of people's inability to verify who they are. Without identity, there are no economic rights and there's limited upward mobility. Without a way to prove who they are, these nameless people can access financial services and are more at risk than those of us fortunate to have that asset. If you've no prior experience with blockchain, I'd recommend starting with our first course, Introduction to Blockchain for Financial Services. You'll learn the basics there. If you're ready to advance with this course, let's do a quick rundown of the topics that we'll cover. First, we'll do a deep dive into the seven types of crypto assets and what it means to tokenize an asset. You'll learn about the phenomenal rise in popularity of something called ICOs, also known as initial coin offerings and the obstacles they must overcome on the road to ubiquity. Now, the term ICO can be tricky. It's not really coins or crypto currencies that are being offered during this event, at least not always. They are digital assets that can represent lots of things like ownership in a company, access to a network, carbon credits or even art. A better term would be token generation events. But because the term ICO is commonplace, we'll stick with it. Next, you'll learn about smart contracts. You'll understand what they are, how they work and why they're so important. You'll also be able to identify the four phases of the deal cycle, search, negotiation, performance and post performance. Will examine through different examples what people are doing with smart contracts and we'll learn how much they're benefiting from this technology. Then we'll dive into identity. Understanding our current system for establishing and managing our identities is an eye popping area. You'll be able to describe at least five problems with the identity status quo and explain the value of what we call a self sovereign identity system. Identity is a problem for enterprises too. The cost of contracting, establishing trust and moving value haven't really been affected much by the Internet's first era. So the obstacles to free enterprise and economic growth are quite profound with this second era. Funding a new business today means simply calling venture capitalists, VC or a local bank. Option for investments are limited. Problems can also arise when managers incentives don't align with those of business owners. This creates what's called a moral hazard, where people take greater risks because they're immune to the consequences. We also have the so-called agency problem. This is responsible for lots of frauds and bad behavior in our economy. After this course, you'll be able to describe at least five problems with the identity system and explain the value of a self sovereign identity system. Finally, you'll study decentralized applications. These are known as DABS or distributed business models. Software no longer has to run enclosed environments or be controlled by a single company. A DAB can run securely across lots of computing devices, not just a single server. The level of decentralization of power is significant. Transacting on blockchain can help us bring about a future that we believe is faster, fair and more distributed than the world that we live in today. Our goal is to empower individuals, entrepreneurs and businesses. We can achieve this by leveling the playing field with the tools of technology and helping people to be involved and to participate. Now before we dive into these exciting lessons on crypto assets and decentralized finance, please join me in the next video because I want to share some more details about me, my career. I also want to introduce you to my co-instructor, Alex Tapscott will explain why we're so passionate about this technology. So on behalf of our academic partner, NCAD, thanks for joining us.
