The 2nd Crypto Asset Lab Conference

Oct 30, 2020 | Organizing Committee

Investments, Economics, and Regulation for Bitcoin, Crypto-Assets, and CBDCs

The 2nd Crypto Asset Lab Conference was held online on October 27th.

The conference, also known as CAL2020, was co-organized and promoted by Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Digital Gold Institute and European Commission-Joint Research Centre

CAL2020 focused on all aspects of bitcoin and crypto assets, especially those pertaining to investment, banking, finance, monetary economics, and regulation.

The work of the conference was open by the rapresentatives of the organizing committee: Ferdinando Ametrano, scientific director of the Crypto Asset Lab, Paola Bongini, full professor of Banking and Finance at Milano-Bicocca University and faculty member, and Lucia Alessi, DG Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

Giovanna Iannantuoni, Rector of Università Milano-Bicocca, had given the institutional greeting Università Milano-Bicocca.

The opening session was concluded with the keynote speech “Bloggers and Bitcoin Prices: A Textual Machine Learning Analysis” by Eric Ghysels, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It was then the turn of the papers’ presentation. Based on the numerous high-quality papers accepted, the session was organized in different streams, each of which was a specific core-topic:

• Crypto-economics, moderated by Paola Bongini, Università Milano-Bicocca;
• Legal and regulatory, moderated by Francesca Mattassoglio, Università Milano-Bicocca and faculty member;
• Quantitative modelling, moderated by Gianna Figà-Talamanca, University of Perugia;
• Investments, moderated by Gianfranco Forte, Università Milano-Bicocca and faculty member,

A round table on the developments in crypto-assets policy and regulation was then held, coordinated by Antonella Sciarrone Alibrandi, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. The panel has seen the interventions of Marco Petracco Giudici, DG Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Dirk Andreas Zetzsche, University of Luxembourg, Filippo Annunziata, Bocconi University, and Maria Teresa Chimienti, European Central Bank.

The conference registered 232 attendees and each of the different sessions were well attended.

All of us at the Crypto Asset Lab of the Milano-Bicocca University, we have been proud to have the DG JRC of the European Commission as conference co-organizer, have appreciated the amazing work of the Program Committee, and have enjoyed all presentations.

Selected papers presented at the conference are invited for submission to the special issue of the Economic Notes (EN) journal on “Special issue on Crypto-assets in finance, law and regulation where do we stand?” and related topics, scheduled for publication in early 2023.

Registrations of each session is available in the videos at the conference program page.

Last, but not least, we thank our sponsors: CheckSig, The Rock Trading, and Deloitte.

We look forward to a continued engagement with you all, on all topics concerning crypto assets, hopefully leading to CAL2021, the 3rd Crypto Asset Lab conference in 2021.