The Future of Money at Cornell Tech

This week the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech hosted the Future of Money, a workshop where some of the brightest minds in finance and computer science exchanged ideas and plans to take cryptocurrency into the future.

The workshop, hosted by Professor Ari Juels, also served as a launch event for Permacoin, a new virtual currency that will be a more sustainable alternative to Bitcoin. Permacoin was developed as a collaboration involving Professor Juels, Andrew Miller, Elaine Shi, and Jonathan Katz of the University of Maryland, and Bryan Parno of Microsoft Research.

The Future of Money workshop kicked off on Thursday evening with a keynote speech from Dr. Ute Wartenberg, Executive Director of the American Numismatic Society. On Friday morning, Duncan Goldie-Scot, a leading figure in the FinTech space, and Director of the Microfinance Club of New York and Chairman of microfinance company Musoni Kenya, delivered the keynote speech.

According to Goldie-Scot, researchers can learn a great deal about the future of money by looking at East African cellphone-based schemes that allow people without formal bank accounts to send and save money. In Kenya, 40% of the country’s GDP goes through the mobile money platform MPESA, with a large number of individual savings and remittance payments happening on cell phones. Musoni Kenya started BitPesa to bridge the gap between Bitcoin and MPESA and create a cheaper and safer way for the “unbanked” to send money.

In addition to talks from faculty researchers and finance industry experts, the workshop also featured an element of competition, with $10,000 in grant money up for grabs. Prior to the week’s events, attendees were split into teams co-led by faculty members and an industry expert. Organizers assigned the team a problem in the virtual currency market and tasked them with creating a viable solution. The teams met virtually prior to the workshop, but only had two hours to meet in person on Friday and finalize their thoughts.

Solutions ranged from methods to verify identity in virtual currency accounts while maintaining user anonymity to ways to tokenize social security numbers to protect customer data.

The judges awarded the $10,000 grant to a group co-led by Larry Rudolph, Two Sigma and abhi shelat, University of Virginia, and proposed ideas at the intersection of trading markets for equities and distributed ledgers.

The judges additionally chose to award a second grant, for $5,000 to a group co-led by Vitaly Shmatikov, UT Austin and Cornell NYC Tech and David True, President NYPAY and Managing Director, Broadly Curious Advisors. That group proposed ideas around the management and ownership of personal data.

Watch a recap of the Future of Money workshop.