The Elgar Companion to Decentralized Finance, Digital Assets, and Blockchain Technologies

This timely Companion offers keen insights into the challenges of valuing digital versus traditional assets, exploring how behavioral and social traits, states, and actions can cause biased perspectives in over- or underestimating the value of digital assets. It provides an objective, scientific view of topics around decentralized finance, digital assets, and blockchain technology. Innovative and comprehensive, the Companion first lays out an overview of how decentralization can impact existing financial systems before exploring decentralized lending and predicting the role of digital assets in future payments. Chapters highlight specific regulatory considerations and the role of central banks, analyzing how cryptocurrencies interact with monetary policy and their potential effects on emerging economies. The book further explores theoretical and empirical foundations for digital assets before examining their impact on the environment and society. Providing a detailed analysis of the status quo of the ecosystem and looking ahead to a crypto-based approach for a sustainable and inclusive future, this book will be an invigorating read for economics students, as well as economists, regulators, and bankers. Front Matter Copyright Contents Contributors Introduction to The Elgar Companion to Decentralized Finance, Digital Assets, and Blockchain Technologies 1. DeFi: an overview of use cases and a status quo analysis of the ecosystem 2. Decentralized lending 3. Ready P(l)ayer One: how we will pay tomorrow and what role crypto may play 4. Economic policy, regulation, and cryptocurrencies 5. Central bank digital currencies in emerging economies: practical considerations 6. Utility tokens, markets in crypto assets regulation (MiCAR), and the costs of being public 7. A minting mold for the eFranc 8. Lessons from a decade of cryptocurrency hacks, 2011–2021 9. Financial economics of automated market makers 10. Systematization of knowledge: constant function market makers 11. Systematization of knowledge: mechanism design and the Ethereum blockchain transaction fee market 12. Systematization of knowledge: the advent of a new incentive, maximal extractable value 13. From scalability to cross-chain DeFi 14. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) 15. The environmental, social, and governance (ESG) aspects of Bitcoin 16. Regenerative finance: a crypto-based approach for a sustainable future 17. Decentralized finance in the developing world: the end of the financial inclusion gap? Index