The Impact of Blockchain Technology on Finance

The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) hosted the Washington release of this year’s Geneva report on “The Impact of Blockchain Technology on Finance: A Catalyst for Change” on September 26, 2018. Simon Johnson, PIIE senior fellow and Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Gary Gensler, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, presented the report’s findings, with Martin Chorzempa, PIIE research fellow, as a discussant and Caroline Atkinson, PIIE board member and former head of Global Policy at Google, as chair.

The 21st Geneva Report on the World Economy reviews the basics of blockchain technology and its challenges, costs, and benefits. The report provides an overview of the technology’s potential direct impact on the financial sector and assesses possible use cases beyond the world of finance.

Simon Johnson has been a senior fellow at the Institute since 2008. He is also the head of the Global Economics and Management group at the MIT Sloan School. He cofounded and currently leads the popular Global Entrepreneurship Lab (GLAB) course, working with start-up companies around the world.

Gary Gensler is also senior advisor to the director of the MIT Media Lab where he works with both the Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Ethics and Governance of AI project. He served as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (2009–14).

Martin Chorzempa joined the Institute in September 2017, after completing his master’s degree in public administration in international development at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has conducted research on financial liberalization in Beijing, as a Luce Scholar at Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research and at the China Finance 40 Forum. He has also worked with the People’s Bank of China.