Gillmore Centre Seminar on Equilibrium in a Decentralized Finance Lending Market

Hosted by Ruslan Sverchkov - Assistant Professor of Finance at Warwick Business School

Speaker: Fahad Saleh is an Associate Professor of Finance and the Nunnenkamp-Cinelli Faculty Fellow at Wake Forest University.

Fahad will examine a lending platform on blockchain. Notably, a blockchain lending platform suffers a disadvantage relative to a traditional lending platform in that a blockchain lending platform is unable to incorporate off-chain information when setting borrowing and lending rates. He will demonstrate that the referenced disadvantage implies that a blockchain lending equilibrium is sub-optimal when compared to a competitive lending market equilibrium. Also, offer a modification of the blockchain interest rate setting specification and demonstrate that this modification generates equilibrium interest rates, and therefore welfare, that is arbitrarily close to a competitive lending market equilibrium. 

Fahad is an Associate Professor of Finance and the Nunnenkamp-Cinelli Faculty Fellow at Wake Forest University. He is also an Associate Editor at Management Science, a co-organizer of the Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Forum and a member of the Finance Theory Group. Fahad's research centres upon economic questions associated with blockchain and has been published in leading academic journals such as Management Science, the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial Economics. Video presentations of some of his work are available here.