Intensive Days 5-6: Digital Finance in Practice
Two days that move from "how do these businesses make money?" to "how do I analyse one, see how it breaks, and read where it is heading?" Built around worked examples (Coinbase, Wirecard, Terra, Knight Capital) and a reusable analyst's framework. Every block pairs a short lecture with a hands-on activity and a 20-question self-check.
Day 5 · How digital finance makes money
Outcome: take any digital-finance business and explain its revenue model and why it survives competition.
| Block | What we cover | Materials |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue mechanics | Where fees sit in the stack (Infrastructure / Protocol / Application), worked on the Coinbase numbers. | Slides · Quiz · Framework sheet |
| Why a blockchain? | The "trust-tax" filter: when a shared ledger earns its keep and when a database is enough. | Slides · Quiz |
| Business models | Five archetypes of digital-finance businesses and the moats you cannot fork. | Slides · Quiz |
| Crypto as an asset class | Markets and portfolio lens: returns, volatility, correlation, the ETF shift. | Slides · Quiz |
| Deep dives (by interest) | Enterprise blockchain ROI (consortium economics, total cost of ownership) and institutional crypto (custody, the product stack). | Enterprise ROI · Institutional Crypto |
Day 6 · Analyse it, stress-test it, look ahead
Outcome: dissect a venture with the Analyst's Canvas, explain how real businesses failed, and place a business in its regulatory and career landscape.
| Block | What we cover | Materials |
|---|---|---|
| The Analyst's Canvas | Three questions for any digital-finance business: Who pays whom, and why? Who needs to show up for this to work? What can break this? | Slides · Quiz |
| Tokenization in practice | Apply the canvas to real-world-asset tokenization: the value chain, who wins, who gets disrupted. | Slides · Quiz |
| When it fails | Worked post-mortems: Wirecard fraud, the Terra/UST death spiral, the Knight Capital deployment. The "what can break this" question made concrete. | Slides · Quiz |
| Strategy & regulation | The Swiss and EU strategic frame: the DLT Act, the strategic pillars, the supervisory lens. | Swiss strategy · Handlungsfelder (DE) |
| Future & careers | Where digital finance is heading and which roles map to which skills. | Slides · Quiz |
All slides, quizzes, and 30-minute mini-versions are also listed under Innovation & Business and the Days 5-6 entries in the sidebar.