Crypto and Digital Economy - HASO19
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Crypto-assets have moved from a niche experiment in “private money” into a live stress test for monetary sovereignty, capital markets, and the legal architecture of trust. This course introduces the digital economy through the lens of crypto-assets and adjacent innovations such as blockchain infrastructures, cryptocurrencies, tokenized instruments, and programmable transactions and asks how these technologies reconfigure familiar legal categories: money, securities, intermediaries, markets, and payment services.
Building from core macroeconomic and monetary-policy concepts, students will look into the intellectual and philosophical roots of cryptocurrencies, understand the mechanics and limits of blockchain systems, and analyze how crypto business models interact with traditional finance. Attention is also paid to the regulatory and supervisory dilemmas issues including decentralization, cross-border scale, and the blurring of lines between payment, investment, and corporate governance. Through case studies, students will develop practical legal reasoning about crypto-asset issuance and trading, smart contracts, DeFi protocols, DAOs, and the evolving EU framework, especially MiCA, alongside related regimes affecting crowdfunding and modern payment services (open banking, instant payments, and security). The aim is to equip students with a structured toolkit for assessing legal risk, regulatory design, and policy trade-offs in a rapidly changing digital financial system. Sylabus 1. Digital Economy and Finance: Core Concepts, Macro Basics, and Monetary Policy 2. Why Crypto? Philosophical and Economic Foundations of Private Money 3. Blockchain Systems: Architecture, Consensus, Governance, and Limits 4. Mapping Crypto-Assets: Cryptocurrencies, Stablecoins, Utility/Investment Tokens, and Tokenization 5. Smart Contracts and Programmable Value: Legal Qualification, Liability, and Enforcement Problems 6. Decentralized Finance: Protocol Design, Market Structure, and Systemic Risk 7. DAOs and On-Chain Governance: Agency, Accountability, and Legal Personality Debates 8. Central Bank Digital Currency and Public Digital Money: Design Options and Legal Constraints 9. Regulation of Crypto-Assets in the EU: MiCA and Its Interfaces with Financial-Market Rules 10. Applied Case Studies: Token Offerings, Crowdfunding, and Payment Services (Open Banking, Instant Payments, Security) Relevant reading materials will be announced in advance. The course will be completed by a presentation on a selected topic, prepared and delivered in groups of three students, followed by an oral discussion with the examiner. Last update: Marešová Svatava, Ing. (27.05.2026)
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