This course offers a comprehensive, applied introduction to digital assets, blockchain technology, and Web3 for students, professionals, and decision-makers. Grounded in the instructor’s experience across regulation, policy, and markets, the course begins with an overview of why digital assets matter and how decentralization, tokenization, and financial inclusion are reshaping finance and the broader digital economy. You will learn how blockchain systems work at a technical and conceptual level, including distributed ledgers, consensus mechanisms, and cryptography, and how transparency and decentralization affect trust, resilience, and governance in blockchain networks.

You will differentiate major categories of digital assets, with particular emphasis on cryptocurrencies and fiat-backed, crypto-backed, and algorithmic stablecoins. The course analyzes key episodes such as the TerraUSD collapse and the 2022 crypto crash to draw lessons about risk, stability, and market design. You will map the digital asset ecosystem, from exchanges and stablecoin issuers to banks, corporations, and institutional investors, and examine how these actors use digital assets for custody, settlement, treasury management, remittances, stablecoin payments, tokenized securities, and decentralized finance. The course also explores individual and industry use cases across real estate, media, supply chains, insurance, and energy, highlighting how centralized and decentralized models interact. Building on this foundation, the course turns to legal and regulatory issues that are critical to the future of digital assets. You will trace the evolution of crypto oversight, examine how high-profile cases like Ripple and FTX shape debates over token classification, exchange governance, audits, and consumer protection, and compare regulatory approaches across major jurisdictions, including the significance of MiCA for stablecoins, crypto-asset service providers, and cross-border market access. The course further examines DIFC’s property-first legal framework for digital assets, emerging compliance challenges at the intersection of digital assets, AI, and legacy law, and the broader forces shaping the future of digital assets and Web3. By the end of the course, you will be able to synthesize these themes into an integrated view of how technology, regulation, and innovation are converging to build a more inclusive, transparent, and collaborative digital economy.