The Faculty of Business Administration (FBA) of the University of Macau (UM) held an Opening Ceremony for the UM FBA Fintech Academic Salon Forum at the FBA Lobby together with over 60 academic staff and students on 15 February 2023.
With the strong support of the University and the FBA, the UM FBA Fintech Academic Salon Forum is initiated by Prof. Wenjin KANG (康文津教授) of the Department of Finance and Business Economics (DFBE) and organized by the organizing group 【Profs. Wenjin KANG, Sili (Alex) ZHOU (周思力教授) and Xiaorong (Rachel) MA (馬笑蓉教授)】. The forum is an open platform that aims to promote collaborative and interdisciplinary research in Fintech and related areas among FBA faculty and students. It will be organized six times in this semester at Wednesday noontime (1-2 pm) of the 5/7/9/11/13/15 teaching weeks. In each forum, a research paper on fintech and financial markets will be presented and discussed.
The Opening Ceremony of the forum began with the FBA Interim Dean Prof. Wei GE (葛偉教授)’s opening remark. In Prof. GE’s speech, he warmly welcomed all participants, introduced the purpose of this forum and appreciated the efforts of all FBA staff on promoting academic research atmosphere. He also hoped that that this forum can provide new opportunity for both faculty and students to explore the impact of technology on the financial industry and wished to introduce more such salon forums of similar nature in other disciplines in the future. After the opening remark, Prof. KANG introduced how the forum is organized and Prof. Jing XIE (謝靜教授) spoke as the representative of the forum seminar presenters respectively.
After the open ceremony, Prof. KANG presented the paper “Self-collateral and Crypto Run”. This paper constructs a model that includes a bank-run feature for the cryptocurrency exchange. Investors deposit their crypto-assets in the exchange for better trading opportunity. The exchange borrows the investors’ assets to invest in a basket of cryptocurrencies that include its own token. Some investors’ withdrawal decreases the trading opportunity available on the exchange platform and hence reduces the value of the exchange’s token. This can prompt more additional investors to withdraw their crypto-asset from the exchange. Therefore, a crypto run happens. The decrease of the exchange token price and the increase of the number of runners can reinforce each other, which creates a downward spiral. The model also shows that high self-collateralness increases the instability of the exchange and hence the probability of the crypto run.
The talks were well-received by 60 professors and Ph.D. students. The speakers and participants also actively exchanged their views and opinions during the question-and-answer session. All participants benefited well from this meaningful and impactful discussion.
