Academia

Depending on who you ask, blockchain technology is poised to revolutionize the world—from creating a universal currency to building a free and truly private internet. Or, the new technology, built with a combination of encryption and transparency, is a solution in search of a problem.

The reality likely falls somewhere in between. While a growing number of startups and researchers are devoting themselves to exploring blockchain's full potential, experts caution that a healthy dose of skepticism is needed to fully evaluate the technology and its eventual place in society.

For many individuals, though—including some looking to invest—blockchain technologies and their limitations remain poorly understood, leaving people vulnerable to being exploited by bad actors. Researchers at Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science are striving to change that through education, outreach and research.

"Early on we realized this was a technology that was not well understood but that a lot of people were interested in," said Ed Felten, the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton.

"There wasn't a coherent, high-quality way of teaching about this technology or explaining it, so we've tried to systematize the knowledge and unsolved problems underlying it."Simply put, a blockchain is a ledger.

But unlike an old-time hotel register gathering dust on a counter, a blockchain ledger is held electronically in multiple locations across the internet. It is visible to any member of the community participating in that particular blockchain.

Each copy of the ledger is held on a computer called a node; when someone makes a transaction using the blockchain—say using virtual currency to order a pizza—the operators of the nodes run through calculations to create a new entry, or block, in the ledger.

Each new block is encrypted using a private, numeric key from the person who bought the pizza; the new blocks are also linked to the previous blocks using additional encryption.

The combination of encryption and visibility makes entries extremely difficult to fake. Because the calculations are carried out on multiple nodes and the results are visible to participants—varying results would be an immediate red flag. The distributed nature of the system means it is hard for a single entity to control. It also makes transactions extremely difficult to track back to a user.

The initial use of blockchain technology was in new forms of currency such as Bitcoin. More recently, the ability to track decentralized transactions reliably has attracted other sectors.

Businesses are exploring its use for contracts, app development and international finance."I think this will be a story of gradual integration, rather than a story of a revolution," said Arvind Narayanan, an associate professor of computer science at Princeton.

"It's an interesting new technology, and a number of us here are working to make that technical footing even stronger."In 2014, Narayanan began teaching one of the first university courses on blockchain, which he and Felten soon expanded into an online Coursera series and a popular textbook.

At the same time, with colleagues and former and current students, they began innovating ways to maximize the benefits of blockchain and minimize the risks. "There's a lot at stake, and a lot not understood about this technology," Felten said.

"As independent academics, the role we try to play is to be explainers, interpreters and B.S. detectors. "That said, Felten and Narayanan believe that blockchain does have a significant role to play—although, most likely, we have yet to imagine what it will be. "In some sense, we're still in search of its major application," Felten said.

Numerous Princeton alumni are attempting to fill that unknown by becoming early innovators in the field, including a co-founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum and founders of several high-profile companies, such as Blockstack (see list below).

Where they will take these and other ventures depends not only on technical finesse, but imagination. 

The decentralized network

Blockchain's most prominent use so far has been in creating cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that are not controlled by a central bank. These currencies are not blockchains themselves—they are abstract tokens—but trades of their coins are recorded on blockchains.

Because ownership and any transfer of ownership is recorded on the public ledger, participants in the Bitcoin system do not need to trust any one entity.

Instead, they place their trust in the distributed ledger technology, which is maintained by a large number of participants around the world.

Each cryptocurrency offers a limited number of coins, although new ones are regularly created and doled out as payment to users, called miners, who are the first to solve the difficult computational problems—the harsh puzzles—added to the chain.

Miners' computers run algorithms that perform the difficult task of building blockchain records and solving mathematical problems. In exchange, they receive coins.While this sounds abstract, Felten points out that the system actually has much in common with conventional currencies.

"Most money we have exists in numbers on some computer somewhere," he said. "If you go into a sandwich shop, they give you a sandwich in exchange for you telling a bank to move numbers from one account to another.

" Like paper money, he continues, cryptocurrencies have value because their supply is limited, and because users can be confident that they can exchange them for goods and services. Cryptocurrencies now trade against the dollar, and their combined market cap is over $100 billion.

Among their biggest attractions, cryptocurrencies offer a way to transfer money over distances and borders without involving intermediaries that may charge high fees. In other cases, certain cryptocurrencies possess advanced features, including the ability to create smart contracts, or self-enforcing rules that govern escrow arrangements and other interactions.

Blockchain is still in its infancy, though, so the true scope of its usefulness is likely yet to be revealed."It's kind of an analogy to the early days of the internet, where some people were super excited and made a lot of claims about how it would change human existence forever, and some said it was just a fad," Felten said.

"While it didn't solve all of humanity's problems, it did turn out to be pretty important. "But for all the interesting current and future uses for blockchain, he added, there is "an extraordinary amount of snake oil and exaggeration in the public rhetoric.

" Because some cryptocurrency transactions are anonymous, for example, they are particularly attractive for criminal groups, including those looking to exchange illegal goods. In other cases, less savvy users are exploited through "pump and dump schemes" in which unscrupulous investors artificially boost the price of a hot commodity and then quickly sell, causing a crash.

"There are a huge number of scams going on," Narayanan warned.Blockchain is also extremely energy intensive, mostly due to mining, which requires specialized equipment with a high demand for electricity. Bitcoin mining alone accounts for about 0.1 percent of total world energy use—more energy than certain countries, including Denmark and Ireland, consume.

As Narayanan testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in August, this represents a serious problem for energy use and the environment.

Coding the future

From the early days, Princeton researchers have been striving to mitigate some of these issues and to better understand the technology and its potential.

"Bitcoin is portrayed in the media as jumping into existence from the mind of one mysterious person, but I co-authored a paper on the component technologies of cryptocurrencies that cited literature from the early 1980s," Narayanan said. "Continuing to improve on cryptocurrency and blockchain will take a lot more computer science research.

"BlockSci, for example, is a database that Narayanan and his colleagues built to analyze hundreds of millions of Bitcoin transactions. BlockSci allows them to investigate trends and to answer questions such as how much money is actually being transferred and how much privacy users truly have.

"There are lots of interesting scientific and commercial questions we can ask with these data," Narayanan said. A recent investigation revealed, for example, that bitcoins are changing hands less often than what was previously assumed—about 1.4 times per month—suggesting that individuals are using coins less as currency and more as investments.

Princeton students and graduates are also pushing the field forward, by creating apps and writing software to improve cryptocurrencies; founding companies based on blockchain; and funding such ventures. Joseph Lubin, one of the founders of Ethereum, graduated from Princeton in 1987 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science.

One recent venture, Basis, founded by Princeton computer science alumni Nader Al-Naji, Lawrence Diao and Josh Chen, recently raised $133 million for effort to build a cryptocurrency that maintains a more stable price than conventional blockchain-based "coins.

" The Basis system creates the virtual equivalent of a central bank, which automatically adjust the supply of currency, based on demand. One recent Princeton alumni venture, Blockstack, aims to build a completely decentralized internet based on blockchain.

According to co-founders Ryan Shea (2012 BSE in mechanical and aerospace engineering) and Muneeb Ali (2017 Ph.D. in computer science), Blockstack, which is registered as a public benefit corporation, was inspired by major issues they perceived in the way the internet works, including concerns about personal data and autonomy.

"We saw that a lack of competition and lack of control for the end user was really hampering freedom, security and privacy around the world," Shea said.

"We wanted to build a new system that empowers the individual and allows each of us to own our data.

"Rather than Facebook storing and controlling all of a person's data on its servers, for example, a Blockstack user could easily migrate his or her digital identity from app to app, if desired. Blockstack software for managing profiles and securing accounts is already available, as are decentralized messenger and document editor apps.

Next year, the company plans to release its own blockchain in tandem with a Blockstack token, and discussions are underway for creating a decentralized Twitter.

"We're working with lots of teams to help them build whatever apps they desire on the platform," Shea says. "The most exciting things are less around the exact details of the underlying infrastructure we provide and more around how we enable developers to create new experiences.

"Blockstack is already coming full circle by inspiring and enabling other Princeton scholars to create new technologies. At the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education's eLab Summer Accelerator Program in August, a team of new Princeton graduates launched Afari, a Blockstack-based social media platform meant to give data privacy back to the people by returning data ownership and privacy to users, and by giving everyone an equal chance for their voice to be heard and rewarded.

"Social media is so broken in our opinion that you need to redesign it from the ground up," said Avthar Sewrathan, co-founder of Afari and a 2018 graduate in computer science.

Blockchain, the team said, makes that possible. "When you make a post on Afari," said co-founder Felix Madutsa, "your data is not stored with us but rather is stored on a decentralized system that you, the user, controls and owns." 

Explore further: 

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency for n00bsProvided by: Princeton University 

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-link-realism-blockchain.html#jCp

Turning Point: Interest in blockchain technology surges as it spawns a highly volatile virtual currency market.

Blockchain is far more than just the technology underlying Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency. It is a tool that promises to decentralize the structures governing all economic transactions and, in the process, redefine our concept of trust.

This is the most revolutionary and innovative aspect of blockchain. But its promise could be undermined.

Trust — the basis of social and commercial interactions — has been guaranteed for centuries by institutionalized trust providers, such as hierarchically organized companies and other third-party authorities. These trust mechanisms have worked for offline business models, but they are becoming obsolete in our hyper-connected digital world.

In the digital-platform economy, trust is best fostered by those who control the platforms. These are tech giants, like Uber and Airbnb, which are replacing the institutionalized trust providers and becoming the keepers of our digital identity and our trustworthiness. They control the mechanisms that build trust upon transaction-based feedback, establishing community-based reputations through the star-score rating system.

In the past few years, however, some open platforms, such as Twitter, have become increasingly restrictive. Things have turned sour, as developers and early users feel betrayed. They had been promised open platforms but that dream was snatched away.

Moreover, incidents involving several tech giants, such as Facebook, eBay, Uber and Experian, have shattered their credibility as reliable keepers of our data. Our fear of surveillance and data misuse has grown.

Thanks to blockchain, people are now able and eager to take on the platform owners by engaging directly with one another via peer-to-peer, or P2P, distributed networks that run on a commonly agreed-upon set of rules.

The resulting machine-driven trust allows users to avoid the fallout from centralized trust mechanisms, such as third-party control or unauthorized surveillance.In fact, the large centralized trust enforcers may soon give way to decentralized trust systems and P2P network-enforced reputation systems that blockchain makes possible.
Under such systems, algorithms confirm the authenticity of each transaction and can record each party’s identity, along with their trust and reputation rating, in the blockchain, which acts as a kind of ledger. Misbehavior is prevented because it is impossible to tamper with or falsify the ledger, and accountability is improved because all actions can be independently audited by any participant.

The benefits of a decentralized system are clear: Users are able to build trust without involving a third party. Group cooperation is enhanced. Fraudulent transactions are minimized. In addition, users can build their personal reputation across multiple platforms, and they can not only control their vast transaction data but also build and manage their own digital identity — bypassing the surveillance of the tech giants.


Ludovic Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Alpine Mining, at the company’s main cryptocurrency mining site in the Swiss village of Gondo.CreditFabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images



Ludovic Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Alpine Mining, at the company’s main cryptocurrency mining site in the Swiss village of Gondo. CreditFabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


It is Uber without Uber, Airbnb without Airbnb.This evolution is already happening. Payment and financial services providers like PayPal are being challenged by Ripple or Circle.

Social media and networking services like Twitter and Facebook face competition from decentralized platforms such as Steemit or Akasha. Decentralized apps — software making decisions and acting autonomously — can be created and deployed on different blockchains like Ethereum or EOS.

These are just a few examples.This beguiling transformation seems too good to be true, and distributed systems based on blockchain face a conundrum.In modern large-scale P2P markets, trust and growth are at odds: The more a network grows, the less trust users often place in it. But user growth is essential to the success of the P2P platform economy.

This problem can be solved by making it harder to join the network (reducing user growth) or by centralizing control to a handful of trusted coders or nodes (reducing decentralization). Unfortunately, the blockchain community seems to favor increased centralization.

Apart from business-to-business platforms, which generally run on top of private blockchains where governance is centralized by design, the fastest, most secure and most rapidly growing P2P platforms are based on public blockchain networks — which are all centralized. A handful of people make and enforce the rules.

For example, only a small group of “superpower” miners — those who tally and authenticate transactions — secure the majority of Bitcoin transactions, while a small core of developers make the vast majority of changes to Bitcoin’s protocols.For Ethereum, the largest public blockchain stack, adopted by thousands of P2P platforms, the situation is even worse.

The top five mining pools secure as much as 80 percent of the transactions in the ledger. The developers are concentrated as well: 20 percent of Ethereum’s core code was written by the same coder.Machine-driven trust is about to jump from systems controlled by tech giants to systems controlled by a small group of anonymous tech gurus.

If only a few members have the ability to edit the system’s ledger and control the protocol, where are the open, transparent, free-to-use and universally accessible blockchains that so many hoped would bypass third-party control and surveillance?

Paolo TascaCreditMark Grey
Paolo Tasca
Credit Mark Grey

Ultimately, this new frontier of managing trust in the digital world presents a rather stark choice: Either we bargain away our privacy to centralized but accountable trust providers or we keep direct “control” of our data via a trust machine run by a limited group of anonymous people who could go rogue.

These governance problems undermine the credibility of blockchain as a trust machine for the new P2P economy. It seems that synthetic trust among peers is not supported by a solid set of principles.

This lack of trust inevitably atomizes the community and fragments group solidarity, as evidenced by the many chains that have forked off from the original protocols of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

For the time being, there is warfare to control those blockchain systems, and not a new common good that the technology still has the potential to deliver.Paolo Tasca is executive director of the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies.

This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

The use cases for distributed ledger technology are on the rise, as evidenced by IBM’s most recent patent application for open scientific research on the blockchain.

The tech giant envisions a system in which a blockchain represents an experiment with individual blocks comprised of project components including research data, data analysis and results as well as post-data analysis and more all with block-linking capabilities to reflect the status of modifications.

The patent, which was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office at year-end 2017, comes on the heels of a separate blockchain patentfiled by IBM with an augmented reality and gaming focus.





Source: U.S. Patent and Trademark OfficeThe scientific research community has been plagued with a lack of transparency for data collection tied to the analysis process, in response to which the blockchain is a possible antidote.

Chief among the issues is a lack of “trustworthy data” and protecting information from unauthorized modifications, all of which the blockchain solves with features like immutability and data security.

IBM isn’t the only entity that is looking to disrupt this process amid what has been described as a “reproducibility crisis in research” and falsified data. But until now, other solutions involving the blockchain have fallen short in addressing key points surrounding confidentiality, accessibility, the use of algorithms for tasks such as “automatic correction” and more, all of which IBM takes on in its patent application.

The company also points to “limited platforms that allow for sharing information about scientific research and showing transparent data collection and analysis steps,” which interferes with researchers getting credit for the work they’ve performed.

Nimble Solution

IBM’s solution involves a nimble computing environment for experiments on the blockchain, one that relies heavily on but is not limited to a cloud computing model in which data uploaded to public databases can be tracked.

They describe a blockchain system that is two-pronged, comprised of both “the trustworthiness of the blockchain concept with open scientific research.”

Their technology accomplishes this by putting scientific experiments on the blockchain, including “data collected, analysis performed and/or results achieved and in doing so bolsters the “trustworthiness and reproducibility of the data and results” amid the immutable nature of the blockchain.

IBM describes a “first block of research data and a second block of analysis data representing a log of an analysis performed on the research data.

” The technology isn’t for static information as the data can also be analyzed for the “reliability and provenance” of the information.

Overall, the technology is designed to accelerate the scientific research process, giving the research community more tools to collect, analyze, draw conclusions and make corrections on their work, a process that also spills into peer reviews, replicating experiments and evaluating the relevance of data all with the benefit of data security that is inherent with the blockchain.

Like nearly every company and institution these days, universities don’t want to miss out on the blockchain gold rush.On college campuses the demand from students for blockchain-related courses is skyrocketing.

In 2014, NYU’s Stern School of Business became the first major academic institution to offer a course on cryptocurrencies; now nearly half of the world’s top colleges teach a blockchain-based class. As a result, schools are fighting among themselves to announce initiatives, courses, and big-name partnerships.

But universities should approach blockchain with caution. Unlike other buzzed-about technologies like virtual reality or self-driving cars, blockchain poses a unique set of challenges that make building educational programs especially difficult.

In the rush to be seen as forward-thinking, universities risk creating programs that are likely to go obsolete, saddle students with debt, and fail to provide a valuable education in the long run.

The core issue is that blockchain is really hard to teach correctly. There’s no established curriculum, few textbooks exist, and the field is rife with misinformation, making it hard to know what is credible. Protocols are evolving at a rapid pace, and it’s tough to tell the difference between a white paper and reality.

Having so much attention around blockchain specifically frames it as a miraculous and novel development rather than an outgrowth of decades of computer science research.

Matt Blaze, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a cyber-security researcher, points out that the push for degree programs in blockchain is part of a trend of over specialization by some engineering schools.

The concepts sound good on paper but don’t live up to their promise. Despite the best of intentions, trends change, and students get stuck in narrow career paths.In order to avoid these pitfalls, universities will have to take an approach they’re not used to. This involves three pillars:

Focusing on core concepts rather than trendier aspects of the technologyGuiding students to understand real industry needsCreating curricula that have rigorously enforced expiration dates.
The key to learning a constantly changing subject is to focus on the core concepts while ignoring the irrelevant yet popular discussions of the day. In the case of blockchain, that means a deep investigation of security engineering, cryptography, and governance concepts — as well as the psychology and context of how people make decisions.

So far, these topics have been given lip service by the startup community but remain largely ignored — especially that last topic. While blockchain is a highly technical and mathematical subject, building anything useful with it also requires a broad understanding of human behavior.

Second, universities can help refocus blockchain entrepreneurs and developers on actual problems businesses are facing. To that end, schools should customize educational programs for different career tracks. Blockchain intersects with law, engineering, and finance in unexpected ways, so analyzing and directing its impact will require looking at it through many different perspectives.

An environmental researcher might be most excited about the ability to have a decentralized network of pollution sensors, whereas a tax lawyer may be most interested in the compliance benefits of immutability.

Finally, in order to keep up with the rapidly evolving field, instructors need to update at least 80 percent of their material every semester.

Anything less will be too inadequate to be relevant. (For example, last semester the focus would have been on utility tokens, but this semester the discussion has moved on to security tokens.) Cryptographic approaches, collective decision making processes, and data organization systems are all rapidly evolving as well.

And that alone isn’t enough –  they need to stay connected with the problems that developers, entrepreneurs, and researchers are actively working on. The most important thing universities can teach students is how to navigate the rapidly changing waters of advancing technologies for themselves.

Blockchain could benefit enormously from more academic involvement because universities can make significant contributions to a field when private industry’s incentives are not aligned with the common good. This includes work on foundational issues related to security, stability, and infrastructure.

 Universities produce research on blockchain that everyone benefits from because it is trustworthy, reliable, and free from conflicts of interest.The fact that you can get a basic economics education at almost any university has helped fuel the growth of the finance industry over the last century.

If blockchain is ever to reach its potential, it needs to be taught in a scalable way. Building a decentralized and fully digitized world will require millions of new minds working on it – and universities will be key to making that happen.

Tarun Wadhwa is CEO of Day One Insights, a strategy and advisory firm focusing on technological convergence, corporate reinvention, and social impact, a contributor to Forbes, and author of Identified: The Digital Transformation Of Who We Are.

He also teaches blockchain-related courses at a national university and at Fortune 500 companies. 

Anish Mohammed has been working in security and cryptography for two decades as a researcher and consultant. His main concentration today is security, scalability, and consensus of blockchains and smart contracts for AI safety, cryptoeconomics, and token engineering. He teaches Fintech at Barcelona’s Harbour.

Space University and hosts lectures, seminars, and workshops on the subject globally.

The Scottish capital has become home to Europe’s first blockchain research facility, thanks to a six-figure collaboration between Edinburgh Napier University and a Hong Kong-headquartered technology company.

Launched last night, the Blockpass Identity Lab (BIL) at Edinburgh Napier’s Merchiston campus is part of a £600,000 partnership between the university and Blockpass IDN, a blockchain-based identity application provider.

As part of an initial three-year partnership, the BIL will explore ways in which blockchain technology can protect personal data from online scammers and hackers. It will be the first blockchain-dedicated research lab in Europe, with the aim of building new data infrastructures which respect the rights, consent and privacy of citizens.

The funding will support five PhD students and create a “virtualised blockchain environment”. After a series of high-profile data breaches at companies including Yahoo, Uber and Equifax, the risks of centralising personal user data are becoming a key corporate concern, with the digital identity market forecast to be worth $9.7 billion (£7.4bn) by 2021.

Identity fraud affects around one in ten people in the UK. Bill Buchanan, professor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier, said: “We are proud to be joining forces with Blockpass to create the first dedicated blockchain laboratory in Europe.

“Blockchain will have a significant and positive impact on multiple industries and the BIL will help to support its ongoing development.

“I look forward to providing updates on the progress of our PhD researchers and the latest innovations that we are providing to our corporate clients.” Adam Vaziri, chief executive of Blockpass IDN, said Edinburgh Napier’s “long history of excellence” in technology and science was a key factor.

“This, combined with Blockpass’ pioneering approach to using blockchain to give users total control over their online identity, is a truly exciting opportunity for the BIL and it will allow the company to establish itself at the forefront of alternative technology innovation using blockchain solutions.

” Minister for the digital economy Kate Forbes called the collaboration “a great example of the type of partnerships which will help to ensure that Scotland has an innovative, world-class cyber security goods and services industry”. Multiple events will be held at the campus in the week following the BIL launch.

These include the inaugural Blockpass Identity Lab Conference on Digital Identity, Blockchain and Advanced Cryptography on Friday, 28 September, and a “hackathon” starting on Saturday, 29 September.

The hackathon invites participants to build prototype applications related to digital identity and blockchain, or other distributed ledger technologies.

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/business/companies/tech/blockchain-lab-launches-in-edinburgh-1-4805746

Crypto is making its entrance into the world’s academic scene, and students are lining up to learn.

A recent Coinbase study reveals that University students want to learn more about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Commissioned by Coinbase in partnership with Qriously, the survey sampled 675 U.S. students, and it found that students across all majors have an interest in blockchain technology.

Some have literal vested interest in the cryptocurrency market itself, while others are looking to leverage blockchain courses to break into the space’s developing job market. Of those surveyed, 18 percent reported holding some value in cryptocurrency.

Another 26 percent indicated that they’re interested in taking a blockchain-related course in the future, with the most immediate interest coming from social science (47 percent) and computer science (34 percent) majors.

Benedikt Bunz, a doctoral student at Stanford, said the "tremendous excitement" around the blockchain and cryptocurrency courses is due to the ease of getting a job after graduation due to the high demand for blockchain experts.

“If you’re an expert in cryptocurrencies and cryptography you’ll have a difficult time not finding a job,” he noted.The survey also studied the top 50 universities in the world as ranked by the U.S. News and World Report, and it found that 42 percent offer at least one class on relating to the blockchain industry.

Geographically, the study indicates that cryptocurrency courses are more popular in the U.S., with Stanford and Cornell University topping the charts for most individual offerings. Outside of the U.S., only "five of the 18 international universities" surveyed offer at least one class on blockchain technology or cryptocurrencies in general.

One of its more salient findings, the survey highlights the high demand for crypto and blockchain courses across a wide spectrum of departments.

Unsurprisingly, most of this demand stems from the finance and computer science disciplines . “Coinbase’s analysis found that, of the 172 classes listed by the top 50 universities, 15 percent were offered by business, economics, finance and law departments, and [4] percent were in social science departments such as anthropology, history, and political science,” the report notes.

Dawn Song, a computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, said the rise in the interest in blockchain courses is due to the potential impact the technology can have on society.

“Blockchain combines theory and practice and can lead to fundamental breakthroughs in many research areas. It can have really profound and broad-scale impacts on society in many different industries.

”Song, who co-taught the “Blockchain, Cryptoeconomics, and the Future of Technology, Business, and Law” in the spring semester of 2018 said the course was so popular that they had to turn students away because the auditorium was filled up.

Elsewhere, David Yermack from the New York University Stern Business School plans to offer his blockchain course in both semesters this academic year as opposed to just one semester like last year.

Yermack launched his course on blockchain and financial services in 2014, and with an original enrollment of 35 students, it featured a smaller class size than the school's typical elective at the time.

By spring 2018, however, the number of enrolled students had increased to 230, a tangible reflection of the growing interest and enthusiasm students are exhibiting toward the field.

The U.S. government will help fund a distributed ledger platform being developed by researchers at the University of California-San Diego.

Subhashini Sivagnanam, a researcher and software architect with the Data Enabled Scientific Computing division at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, won $818,433 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Open Science Chain (OSC), a proposed distributed ledger which will help researchers efficiently access and verify data collected through scientific experiments, according to the NSF's website.

NSF, a long-standing scientific organization, serves as a key conduit for research initiatives in the U.S. to tap federal resources. The government organization has funded a number of blockchain projects in previous years, including those focused on different aspects of cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and blockchain technology use cases.

Public records show that the project entails "a web-based cyber infrastructure platform built using distributed ledger technologies that allows researchers to provide metadata and verification information about their scientific datasets and update this information as the datasets change and evolve over time in an auditable manner."

Simply put, the network would constitute a living – and digital – catalog of their work, growing as more information is developed and added. Researchers will be able to better trust the data they are examining, according to the abstract.

The grant will begin on Sept. 1, 2018, and carry through until Aug. 31, 2021, according to the award letter.

Supercomputer image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Wolfie Zhao   

Technology giant IBM has launched a new research center through a partnership with Columbia University in a move aimed to boost blockchain application development and education initiatives.

Opening Tuesday, the center is located in the Manhattan campus of Columbia University in New York City and will, among other things, incubate blockchain applications through a combination of academic and technical expertise, the firm said.

Soon to be announced, a dedicated committee comprised of both Columbia faculty members and IBM research scientists will start reviewing proposals for blockchain "curriculum development, business initiatives and research programs" later this year.

In addition, the center will advise on regulatory issues for startups in the blockchain space and provide internship opportunities to improve technical skills for students and professionals with an interest in the tech.

John H. Coatsworth, Columbia University provost, commented in the announcement that he expects the partnership will "significantly advance scholarship and applications," especially for blockchain's use case in data sharing.Coatsworth added:

"Our students and faculty, working together with IBM, will play an important role in the vibrant exchange of ideas and research surrounding this transformative technology."

The announcement marks the latest effort by the blockchain industry to invest in a top-tier university in the U.S. to accelerate blockchain understanding and adoption.

As reported by CoinDesk in June, San Fransisco-based distributed ledger startup Ripple said it will invest $2 million in blockchain research initiatives in the University of Texas at Austin in the next five years, as part of its pledge to invest $50 million in worldwide institutions.

Columbia University image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

By 

Michael Patterson

 and 

Andrea Tan



 Candidates get their first look at the new material next month Finance and crypto worlds have become increasingly intertwined
It might be the definitive sign that cryptocurrencies have arrived on Wall Street.CFA Institute, whose grueling three-level program has helped train more than 150,000 financial professionals, is adding topics on cryptocurrencies and blockchain to its Level I and II curriculums for the first time next year.

Material for the 2019 exams will be released in August, giving candidates their first opportunity to start logging a recommended 300 hours of study time.CFA added the topics, part of a new reading called Fintech in Investment Management, after industry participants showed surging interest in surveys and focus groups.

The worlds of finance and crypto have become increasingly intertwined after last year’s Bitcoin boom, with regulated futures now trading in Chicago, blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. dabbling in digital assets, and scores of Wall Streeters joining crypto-related startups.


While digital coins have tumbled in 2018 and the real-world impact of blockchain ventures has thus far been limited, some observers say the technology could ultimately transform swathes of the global financial system.


“We saw the field advancing more quickly than other fields and we also saw it as more durable,” said Stephen Horan, managing director for general education and curriculum at CFA Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. “This is not a passing fad.”

Tougher Through the Years
The notoriously demanding CFA curriculum will now include crypto, blockchainSource: CFA Institute


The CFA material on crypto and blockchain will appear alongside other fintech subjects including artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and automated trading. More crypto topics, such as the intersection of virtual currencies and economics, may eventually be added to the curriculum, Horan said.

“It will be beneficial for us, since there’s been a huge expansion and adoption of crypto in our investment universe,” said Kayden Lee, 27, a financial economics student at Columbia University who took the CFA Level I exam in June and is interning as a fund analyst in Singapore during his summer break.

“But more importantly the focus is on fintech and blockchain,” Lee said. “How it works to improve, unravel or even disrupt certain sectors.”The new topics will also make an appearance in the CFA readings on professional ethics, an area that some say is lacking in the crypto world.

Many virtual currency projects operate in a legal gray zone, while digital-asset trading venues and initial coin offerings are rife with examples of fraud, market manipulation, money laundering and theft. Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, has lost more than half its value this year amid growing regulatory scrutiny and a series of exchange hacks.

Read more: What the World’s Governments Are Saying About Cryptocurrencies


A record 227,031 people in 91 countries and territories registered to take CFA exams in June, seeking a better understanding of finance, improved job prospects or some combination of the two. A majority of the candidates came from Asia, which also happens to be where much of the world’s virtual currency trading takes place.

About 45 percent of Bitcoin transactions are paired against the Japanese yen, according to CryptoCompare.com, while Korean crypto exchanges are some of the world’s largest.

It’s positive that organizations like CFA are drawing attention to the space, said Darius Sit, a former foreign-exchange and bond trader at BNP Paribas SA who’s now managing partner of cryptocurrency trading firm QCP Capital Pte in Singapore.

“More education is always good.”