On a clear, warm night earlier this year, several dozen students at the University of California, Berkeley, folded themselves into gray chairs for a three-hour class on how to think like blockchain entrepreneurs. The evening’s challenge, presented by Berkeley city councilmember Ben Bartlett, was to brainstorm how blockchain technology might be used to alleviate the city’s growing homeless problem.

“We have at least 1,400 homeless people in our city, and that includes many right here at UC Berkeley,” Bartlett told the class. “So how can we use blockchain to fund a new prosperity? That’s a challenge I’d like you to take on.”

The course, taught by visiting professor and former venture capitalist Po Chi Wu, is among a growing number of classes and research initiatives on blockchain technology emerging at universities. Blockchain---a method for creating and maintaining a global ledger of transactions that doesn’t require a third-party middleman such as a bank, government, or corporation—is best known for its role in powering the virtual currency bitcoin. But applications are springing up in other areas as well, including retail, humanitarian aid, real estate, and finance. Although some analysts believe blockchain won't gain widespread adoption for another five or 10 years, companies like IBM, Facebook, and Google are investing heavily in the technology—and universities are taking note.

New York University, Georgetown, and Stanford are among the institutions that offer blockchain technology courses to get students thinking about its potential uses and to better prepare them for the workforce. Job postings requiring blockchain skills ballooned by 200 percent in the first five months of this year, compared with the same period a year earlier, though they remain less than 1 percent of software development jobs, according to the research firm Burning Glass Technologies. Universities like MIT, Cornell, and Columbia are launching labs and research centers to explore the technology and its policy implications and seed the development of rigorous curricula on the topic.

Ikhlaq Sidhu, founding director and chief scientist of UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, and Alexander Fred-Ojala, research director of Data-X, a UC Berkeley research lab, argued in a recent blog post that not teaching about blockchain “would be equivalent to ignoring internet technology when it emerged 25 years ago.”

A Tough Fit for Academic Curricula

There are reasons to be skeptical about blockchain’s potential, and even universities exploring the technology are taking a relatively cautious approach. It is hugely energy-inefficient, and currencies based on blockchain technology have proved susceptible to fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. That means research that could form the building blocks of curricula is nascent, textbooks are scarce, and scholars are only beginning to develop the interest and skills to contemplate teaching the subject. Plus, blockchain is multidisciplinary, spreading across such fields as computer science, law, finance, and engineering, making it a tough fit for the relatively rigid world of academia.

Not teaching about blockchain "would be equivalent to ignoring internet technology when it emerged 25 years ago." Ikhlaq Sidhu and Alexander Fred-Ojala

“Academics feel a lot of pressure to maintain their status as ‘world-class experts’ in some narrowly defined field,” Wu, the Berkeley visiting professor, wrote in an email. “Just keeping up with the advances in their field is challenging enough and demands all their time and energy.”

Sidhu says some universities are hesitant to teach and research emerging technologies because many highly touted tech innovations never really take off and prove to be dead ends. “You can’t expect universities to be out ahead on all these topics,” he says. “It takes so long for everyone to agree that there's something going on, and often, by the time they all get it, it’s irrelevant and not the thing that should be taught anymore.”

But he and others say blockchain appears to have staying power—and the potential to shake up global systems. In his blog post with Fred-Ojala, the pair envision the creation of tamper-proof digital identities and records, a decentralized internet controlled by users rather than service providers, and public infrastructure with fewer intermediaries—such as an electric grid that allows producers and consumers to connect directly. “Here's where we can help,” he wrote of universities. “We can show [students] the challenges and opportunities, give them access to resources, and then encourage them to solve the problem on their own.”

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to the Blockchain

He and other UC Berkeley professors started to recognize the emerging role for academia in blockchain three years ago, when employees from companies like Google and Yahoo began discussing the technology during presentations to students enrolled in an executive education program run by the Sutardja Center. In 2017, the center launched a Blockchain Lab and a series of “collider sprints,” projects that connect students with industry experts and challenge them to create innovative solutions to problems. Last fall, it also created its first blockchain class, the one visited by Councilmember Bartlett. Concurrently, UC Berkeley’s law school launched a course titled Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, and the Future of Technology, Business and Law. “Other offerings are in the works,” Sidhu says. “It's still a bit decentralized, but you can see the path.”