Digital Assets: Foundations, Markets, and Regulation

University of Pennsylvania via Coursera

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

6 weeks, 1 hour a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Intermediate
Subtitles

English

Found in

Overview

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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.

Syllabus

Introduction to Digital Assets

This opening module introduces the field of digital assets through the instructor’s market, policy, and regulatory lens. You will examine why digital assets have become central to debates about finance, innovation, and public policy by looking at institutional adoption, tokenization, financial inclusion, and recent market events. The module sets the stage for the rest of the course by helping you connect headline developments to the deeper economic and societal shifts behind them.

Blockchain Technology and Stablecoins

This module builds the technical and conceptual foundation for understanding blockchain and digital assets. You will explore how distributed ledgers, consensus mechanisms, cryptographic keys, transparency, and decentralization work together to support digital asset systems. The module also examines stablecoin design and the TerraUSD collapse, showing how technical architecture, reserve management, and market confidence can determine whether a system remains resilient or fails under stress.

Digital Asset Ecosystem and Use Cases

This module shows how digital assets operate beyond theory by tracing their use across exchanges, stablecoin issuers, banks, corporations, individual users, and industry applications. You will examine major ecosystem participants, organizational adoption strategies, everyday consumer and creator use cases, and sector-specific experiments in real estate, media, supply chains, insurance, and energy. By the end, you will have a practical view of how digital assets are being tested, adopted, and challenged in real-world settings.

Legal and Regulatory Issues with Digital Assets

This module examines the legal and regulatory frameworks that increasingly determine how digital assets can be issued, traded, governed, and integrated into mainstream markets. You will investigate why regulation matters, how landmark disputes and failures have shaped policy, and how major jurisdictions are approaching classification, stablecoin oversight, and market conduct. The module also expands to property law, AI, and legacy legal regimes so you can better understand the real compliance challenges facing firms operating across borders.

Web3 and Looking Ahead

This concluding module brings together the course’s major themes to help you form a balanced, forward-looking view of digital assets and Web3. You will connect technical design, regulation, automated finance, adoption barriers, and inclusion into a broader picture of how the ecosystem may evolve. The module encourages you to think critically about what it would take for digital assets to move from experimentation to durable mainstream use.