The Financial Digital Assets Frontier

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the value chains for all major business sectors, with a great impact on the way we interact, socialize, transact, and trust the systems that we use on a daily basis. The magnitude of this major health crisis imposed a new level of digitalization, to which everyone needed to adapt, with great costs in terms of social, psychological, political, and economic transformation. In order to adapt in a new digital environment, imposed by the pandemic, we witnessed the adoption of decentralized ecosystems and technologies. One of the technologies that stood as foundation for this decentralization movement is blockchain. The first adaptations for blockchain technology happened within the financial services, with the introduction of the financial digital assets or crypto assets. This created the base for concepts like decentralized finance (DeFi), Web 3.0, and the metaverse. This chapter will assess the frontier of financial digital assets, which has emerged and developed the perfect infrastructure for scalability, efficiency, and transparency.