Last week, our Founder and CEO Richard delivered a popular guest lecture at the business school of the University of Exeter. Exeter, a charming city dating back to the Roman era, is located in Devon in the southwest of England, and its university is constantly ranked as one of the very best in the UK. Their master’s programme in financial technology has a strong focus on how blockchain, and the bitcoin protocol in particular, can help to transform the financial industry.
In his lecture, titled “The Impact of Web3 Technologies on Financial Services” and which drew an audience of economics, finance and computer science students, Richard delved deep into the trends that drive the fundamental shift that is currently underway in traditional financial services with regards to digital assets, tokenisation, the use of conditional logic smart legal contracts and blockchain technology.
Richard explained why, in his view, the future of finance services and technology will require a new way of thinking. Economics and computer science skills will be vital in this world, as more and more real world assets (RWAs) are tokenised and expressed in digital form, with financial infrastructure workflows and processes also being modernised to cope with updated market and regulatory requirements, plus dynamic global realities.
The intelligent, lively and engaging discussion that followed the lecture was excellent, and left Richard both energised and impressed.
“It was a real pleasure to host Richard as a guest speaker to our students here at Exeter. His talk was pitched at both some of our non-technical undergraduates on the Bitcoin module, as well as MSc FinTech students geared more towards careers in technology. As ever, his clarity and humour made for a captivating session that really helped to break down some of the mysticism around ‘blockchain’. With his company Tokenovate as the core example, he showed our students how secure automation of financial processes can be built using Bitcoin as it was supposed to – a secure timestamp server working alongside ‘traditional’ cloud based technologies. For me personally, listening to Richard explain how derivatives trading is automated on top of Bitcoin SV was a highlight of our guest speaker series this year”.
Professor Jack Rogers, Programme Director
Thank you to Professor Jack Rogers, Dr Martha Omolo and all the students for the kind invitation and inspiring session. Keep up the inspiring work, and we hope to see you again in the future!
