Fintech News & Insights

The Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3), a collaboration based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in NYC, announces the addition of Will Cong to its cohort of faculty fellows, joining members from Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Cornell Tech, EPFL, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, University College London, UIUC, SMU, and the Technion.

The Center for Hospitality Research (CHR), with leading acquirer Worldpay and commerce platform FreedomPay, commissioned a study examining the state of digital payments infrastructure in the hospitality industry broadly. Their findings were published by CHR in Implementation vs. Rewards of Tech Investment.

In a panel led by Fintech@Cornell executive director Susan Joeph, Cornell cryptocurrency experts debated the pros and cons of digital currencies’ purpose, privacy, governance, and stability. Read more here.

Prompted by President Biden’s Executive Order on Ensuring the Responsible Development of Digital Assets, the initiative hosted a June 6, 2022 Cornell Convenes roundtable in Washington DC. The product of that cross-industry discussion reflects nuanced opinions from the regulatory, academic, and industry perspectives. Release details here. See above for full report.

Will Cong has been named Top Ten Quant Professors for 2022 by Rebellion Research. This asset management firm applies machine learning and AI to investment decision-making tools.

Bloomberg.com, reporting on The Merge, consulted Johnson professor and Fintech at Cornell faculty director Will Cong on the implications of this “next generation of Ethereum.” Noting that individuals need only load three programs and stake their own ether to activate validator software, Cong predicts the move will make entry more accessible.  Read more here. 

Maryam Farboodi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present. More webinars in this monthly series can be found here.

The European Financial Management Association has given its 2022 Best Paper Award to Value Premium, Network Adoption, and Factor Pricing of Crypto Assets, co-authored by Cornell’s Will Cong and Andrew Karolyi with Tsinghua University’s Ke Tang and Weiyi Zhao.

Staking, Token Pricing, and Crypto Carry by Cong with Zhiheng He and Ke Tang, received the 18th Annual Conference of the Asia-Pacific Association of Derivatives (APAD) Best Paper Award.

Also this month, Tax-Loss Harvesting with Cryptocurrencies, authored by Cong with Wayne R. Landsman, Edward L. Maydew, and Daniel Rabetti, received the best paper prize from the 15th International Risk Management Conference as well as the CIRF-PBFJ Research Excellence Award at the 8th China International Risk Forum.

The Cornell FinTech Club is the first all-encompassing, undergraduate-led club that aims to create spaces and opportunities for students in fintech through weekly discussions, an education series, and corporate speaker events. Club events are open to undergraduate and graduate students, to help foster a community for fintech at Cornell University.

Fintech at Cornell, in collaboration with eCornell, will host this Keynote webinar, featuring Chris Giancarlo, former Chairman of the US CFTC and current senior counsel at Wilkie Farr & Gallagher, in conversation with Johnson Graduate School of Management professor Maureen O’Hara, moderated by Rob Krugman, Chief Digital Officer of (Fintech at Cornell sponsor) Broadridge. Register here.

Fintech at Cornell Faculty Director Lin William Cong has received the following honors for his work this month:

• Asseth-Kaiko Prize for Research in Cryptoeconomics – Best Paper and Talk on Crypto-Wash Trading;
• 4th UWA Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference, Best Paper (1st Prize), for work on Tax-Loss Harvesting.