Key Findings

56 percent of the world’s top 50 universities now offer at least one course on crypto or blockchain — up from 42 percent in 2018

Twice as many students report having taken a crypto or blockchain course than they did in 2018

Nearly 70 percent of crypto and blockchain classes are in departments outside of computer science, including law, the humanities, and economics

Original Coinbase research includes a Qriously survey of 735 U.S. students age 16 and older, a comprehensive review of courses at 50 international universities, analysis of research citations and non-coursework offerings, and interviews with professors and students.

Cornell University tops the Coinbase 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education list

During the 2017 school year, Cornell University undergrad Joseph Ferrera wanted to learn more about cryptocurrency and blockchain, which was dominating the news amid the runup in the price of Bitcoin. Few classes existed at the time, so he and a classmate decided to form a club for interested students called Cornell Blockchain, and they asked Emin Gün Sirer, a Computer Science professor and co-director of Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3), to advise them.

In short order, the club filled a room designed to hold 120 students. “I expected that about 80 to 90 percent of club members would be pretty geeky computer science students,” notes Sirer. “I was so incredibly wrong. I’d say at most 20 to 30 percent are from computer science, and the rest are from all across campus.”

Unlike many other new technologies — and established industries — cryptocurrency and blockchain has quickly shown its potential to reshape multiple academic and professional disciplines: computer science, legal, economics, finance, social science, the list goes on. As students from a wider and wider cross-section of majors express interest in learning about the burgeoning field, some of the world’s best universities are exploring how they can meet surging demand to sate curiosity about the technology and set their graduates up for success.

“The blockchain domain’s interdisciplinary nature makes it very different from any traditional field,” notes University of California Berkeley computer science professor Dawn Song. And so at schools around the world, legal scholars are grappling with ethics and regulatory structures, economists are exploring the potential of borderless currency, computer scientists are building new applications, and social scientists are looking at overall impact on society.

All of which is reflected in the Cornell Blockchain club. “There’s a ton of interest from the business school, the hotel management school, the medical school, even the agriculture school,” says Ferrera, who himself graduated from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration this spring and is working as the business manager of Ava Labs, a startup founded by Cornell’s Sirer working to explore decentralized, blockchain-based payment technology. “We’ve had so many professors reach out to to learn more about blockchain and see how it applies to their field. It’s really cool to be part of a community where there’s so much engagement.”