April 2026
Intermediate
288 pages
9h 2m
English
Content preview from Financial Mathematics for Cryptocurrencies
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Introduction
This book is written for quantitative finance practitioners seeking to understand digital assets, and graduate students in financial mathematics or computational finance. Traditional finance (TradFi) professionals transitioning to decentralized finance (DeFi) will also benefit from this book. The material is structured to accommodate this diversity of readers.
Scope. The scope of this book is to provide an introduction to financial mathematics for digital assets. We refer to digital assets as all assets traded and recorded on a blockchain, as part of DeFi. This includes cryptocurrencies, coins, and other tokens, such as NFTs.
Throughout most of this book, we discuss cryptocurrencies in more detail. We use the terms cryptocurrencies, tokens, and digital assets interchangeably where their financial-mathematics properties coincide; differences are highlighted when relevant.
We adapt standard methodologies from TradFi with adjustments specific to digital assets. Our core approach is to extend proven mathematical frameworks to accommodate the characteristics of blockchain-based markets.
We use blockchain and network interchangeably, defining a blockchain as a database distributed across a network of nodes. For all tradable assets discussed, the database serves as a record of transactions, which we refer to as the ledger.
Because we focus on financial mathematics, we do not present in-depth the technology of blockchains unless it is relevant for applying financial mathematics ...
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