Decentralized Finance

Description: Finance is undergoing a revolution with the arrival of blockchain technology and smart contracts. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is an ecosystem of smart contracts that allows token trading, lending, investing (yield farming), and the handling of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The pace of this revolution is hard to overstate. Stablecoins (digital tokens pegged 1:1 to currencies like the US or Canadian dollar) processed more than $30 trillion in payments in 2025 alone, more than Visa and Mastercard combined. The entire crypto market is now worth roughly as much as Canada's entire economy, and nearly half the combined value of every company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, banks, energy producers, miners and all. DeFi protocols alone hold over $100 billion in user deposits, even after the occasional hack reminds everyone how young and risky this infrastructure still is. And it is not just a US or offshore story anymore: in May 2026, Calgary's own Tetra Digital Group launched CADD, Canada's first fully regulated, Canadian-dollar-pegged stablecoin, backed by National Bank of Canada, Shopify, Wealthsimple, and ATB Financial. The underlying technology will have a huge impact on how we do finance, and you will be learning it just as Canada starts building its own piece of that infrastructure.

This class will bring you to the frontier of knowledge in this space. This also has downsides: there is practically no course material, and you will have to do a significant amount of independent learning. This is not a class where you will get everything handed to you on a silver platter. To succeed, you need to be self-motivated, able to teach yourself skills you are missing, eager to learn, and willing to invest a great deal of time.

This class will make you very employable in a high growth area with many great job opportunities. Please note that students will code in this class, so you need to be open to that. The good news is that you do not need any prior coding experience: modern AI coding tools mean that as long as you are willing to engage with code and put in the effort to learn, you can pick it up as you go.

Pre-requisites

Admission to the Haskayne School of Business and FNCE 317. The prereqs can be waived for students from other UCalgary faculties. We will code in Julia, a modern language designed for data analytics that is good at parallel computing. No prior coding experience, in Julia or otherwise, is required, just a willingness to learn with the help of AI coding assistants. Julia is freeware: https://julialang.org/. 

You also need to be interested in Finance and show interest in the underlying economic mechanisms of this new smart contract system.

Registration

There is no formal application process for this course. If you meet the prerequisites, simply sign up for the class through the normal course registration system. Otherwise, please contact Alfred Lehar at alehar@ucalgary.ca.