By Giovanna Massarotto Collusion is one of the greatest threats to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which has surpassed $100,000 in value, and its network currently processes around 450,000 transactions per day. Many argue that Bitcoin could challenge the U.S. dollar’s global dominance by enabling a decentralized, peer-to-peer payment system. Bitcoin transactions…Read More
Blog
2025 IMF-WIFPR Conference
On June 17, 2025, the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation and the International Monetary Fund co-hosted the IMF-WIFPR Conference on the Evolving Global Financial Architecture at the IMF Headquarters in Washington D.C. WIFPR and the IMF brought together a distinguished group of academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to…Read More The Carveout Co-Op: A Truce in the Lender Wars
By Brett Seaton Background Cooperation agreements (Co-Ops) with a carveout emerged over the past two years as an innovation in the landscape of corporate restructuring, shaped by the rise of covenant-lite loans and lender-on-lender violence. The “dropdown” transaction pioneered by J. Crew in 2016 and the “uptier” created by Serta…Read More
GPT in the GP’s Office: Where AI Meets VC
By Mallika Patkar A growing number of venture capital firms are exploring AI solutions to support everything from deal sourcing to portfolio monitoring. These use cases are not limited to large, data-rich institutions; smaller, more agile firms are also experimenting with tools and custom workflows to gain an edge. At…Read More
US Participation in the Basel Committee and the Issue of Transparency
By Matthew Bisanz and Jeffrey P. Taft In March 2025, the US Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) released a report on how the US federal banking regulators participated in the development of the Basel III Endgame capital standards (“GAO Report”).[1] While the GAO Report sheds some light on the operations of…Read More
Decentralization: What Blockchain Can Learn from European Schools of Political Economy
By Giovanna Massarotto Blockchain technology is a relatively new phenomenon that many of its proponents believe can help to decentralize the economy and enable economic freedom. However, what decentralization means is often unclear. Importantly, we have a century of economic studies focused on decentralization, offering valuable lessons to inform today’s…Read More
Lessons from Brazil: Central Banks Fostering Innovation
By Mallika Patkar and Joselyn Salazar According to the Atlantic Council’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Tracker, 134 countries and currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are currently exploring a CBDC. This marks a significant increase from just 35 countries in May 2020. While many countries are exploring CBDCs,…Read More
America at a Crossroads: Securing Global Digital Asset Leadership
By Sarah Hammer, Executive Director at the Wharton School and Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School America stands at the precipice of a digital finance revolution—a historic opportunity to lead global innovation, but one that other nations are rapidly mobilizing to capture. Throughout my career investigating…Read More
A Primer on Banking-as-a-Service
By JV Pineda Over the past few years, advancements in technology and regulation such as cloud-based infrastructure, open banking regulations, and Application Programming Interface (API)-driven services have paved the way for new models of the delivery of banking services. Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is one of these newly emerged models, enabling non-bank entities…Read More
A Primer on Prediction Markets
By Victoria Liu and Djavaneh Bierwirth Crowdsourcing opinions, experiences and answers is not news to the Internet. Per Wolfers and Zitzewitz, “the power of prediction markets derives from the fact that they provide incentives for truthful revelation, they provide incentives for research and information discovery, and the market provides an…Read More