In this short four-week course, we aim to give a simple and broad mathematical overview of the current state of decentralized finance including topics like stablecoins, automated market making, among others. This course assumes a reasonable amount of comfort with advanced undergrad or basic graduate courses in probability, linear algebra, and analysis, though future iterations will likely have fewer prerequisites.
Lectures are every Tuesday and Thursday from 3:00-4:00 PM, starting on June 14, 2022, at Packard 202. Most lectures will be taught by Guillermo Angeris, but at least one will have a guest lecturer.
The lectures below are subject to change, but should be reasonably stable.
Tue (6/14): Basic overview of blockchains and interacting with them (slides)
Thu (6/16): Simple applications (NFTs, voting, basic games) and some analyses (slides)
Tue (6/21): Basic properties of constant function marker makers (slides)
Thu (6/23): "Sophisticated" results in constant function market makers (slides, proof of replication)
Tue (6/28): Oracles, miner extractable value, and atomicity (slides)
Thu (6/30): Lending and stablecoins (slides)
Tue (7/5): Staking and staking derivatives (guest lecture by Tarun Chitra, slides)
Thu (7/7): Optimal routing and order execution (guest lecture by Theo Diamandis, slides)
Every lecture has a (very short) set of problems associated with it that should take no more than an hour or so to complete. Of course, given that this is just a set of lectures, no homeworks will be graded.