CISE Seminar: Andreas Veneris, University of Toronto – February 12, 2021

Today’s global economic digitization of society, driven by technology trends, continues to advance at exponential speeds. Billions of Internet of Things devices have already made their way into our daily lives, our homes and cars, but also into health care, manufacturing, supply-chains and other infrastructure. This development is in sharp contrast to the financial sector which still operates on legacy infrastructure(s).

Further, the emergence of Decentralized Finance (or blockchain technology) has already demonstrated a capacity to disrupt the financial sector, impact national sovereignty, and affect established monetary transmission channels. Hence, it is no surprise that nations and tech-firms are now building new digital infrastructures for finance, banking, and payments that circumvent those legacy practices. At the same time, governments around the world find themselves in an equally awkward position as their monetary/fiscal policies rely on established financial/banking channels. More recently, announcements by many advanced central banks promise to examine the issuance of digital currencies which in effect, it redefines the very essence of fiat money for the past many centuries. In this presentation, we will first outline the history and core premises of blockchain technology (or decentralization) in the past decade. Next we will provide direction for some open technical R&D challenges, we will elaborate on legal issues this new field entails, and we will conclude with an overview of its impact to national sovereignty and this of central bank digital currencies.

Professor Andreas Veneris is a Connaught Scholar and Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, cross-appointed with Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1998. He has been joint faculty at the Athens University of Economics and Business (2006-16) and at the University of Tokyo (2010-11). His research in blockchain focuses on mechanism design, formal methods, IoT, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), techno-legal questions and cryptoeconomics. He has published more than 140 papers, received a 10-year Best Paper Retrospective Award, and other best paper awards and patents. Recently, he was commissioned by the Bank of Canada give a design for a national digital currency. In the past, he was member of the team in the first webcast ever (37th Grammy Awards, 1995) as acknowledged by the American Congress.