How Top-Universities are Responding to Rising Interest in Cryptocurrencies

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Written by UnivAdmitHelp
Category: Insights & Information
Published on 11 Sep 2018

If you know any young person or even read the newspapers, you would have heard about cryptocurrency and the promise of quick wealth by investing in Bitcoin or Ripple – the two more famous of the ~200 cryptocurrencies in the world, along with a healthy dose of debate on its merits with everybody from the Governments to the big banks weighing in with their opinions.

While these currencies represent a new form of “value storage”, the real attraction for a large number of people is the technology on which it is based – blockchain.

Wikipedia describes blockchain as a decentralized, distributed and public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the consensus of the network. This means that it is a system that is managed autonomously by the participants in the system based on certain rules and does not need a centralized agency to impose these. In other words, it democratizes the process of administration and brings in a certain level of transparency which allows the cost of transactions to be lowered. Therefore, any industry that involves records and settlement of any kind between multiple parties can be technically disrupted by this technology – finance, insurance, legal contracts, education, healthcare etc.

The good thing is that the top institutes have taken note of the potential of this technology and as per a recent survey commissioned by Coinbase (the leading exchange to trade all manners of cryptocurrencies) along with Qriously, almost 42% of the world’s top 50 universities have started offering courses related to this technology. And this is inter-disciplinary – computer science, business and law departments have already started offering courses related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies. This is a great example of the universities responding quickly to technology changes and allowing students to explore in preparation for future roles in this domain.

The top 5 universities where students are looking to study crytocurrencies are -:

Ranking	University
1.	National University of Singapore
2.	Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
3.	University of California Berkeley
4.	University of Zurich
5.	Massachusetts Institute of Technology