Crypto courses in the top universities are getting more interesting

DeHacker
DeHacker Security
Published in
4 min readApr 18, 2022

Not long ago, there was a message about the university’s course on cryptocurrency. Stanford students can earn an NFT as long as they take the “Crypto and Blockchain Technology” course and pass the exam. The price floor of this NFT on OpenSea is 9.9 ETH. It is reported that 97 people have obtained the NFT so far. In fact, in the context of the shortage of talents in the blockchain and crypto fields, this kind of courses launched by world-renowned universities were once very popular.

The crypto industry is in short supply

According to the report in 2021 from LinkedIn, the demand for employees with blockchain and crypto experience is on the rise. Compared to August 2020, U.S. jobs that include terms such as “blockchain” and “crypto” have increased by 615%. What’s more, in the analysis of user profiles for “highest rate of employment”, blockchain became the term with the highest frequency.

The global demand for blockchain talents has shown explosive growth in the past few years, but in contrast, talents are still in short supply

The biggest demand for blockchain talents first comes from the IT industry. In addition to the traditional public chain that requires a large number of computer science and cryptography talents, today’s large number of DApps, De-Fi and Game-Fi also require corresponding smart contract developers and engineers. In addition, NFT and Metaverse companies need more diverse talents, such as art direction or game planning direction.

In addition, the demand for blockchain talents in the financial industry is also gradually rising, especially for traditional financial institutions. Major banks, financial regulators, consulting companies such as Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, etc. have all released reports confirming that blockchain is the main development direction of financial technology in the future. Central banks in various countries have begun to prepare their own CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies). In the case of JPMorgan, the blockchain-related jobs posted so far include: software development, front-end and back-end engineers, marketers, and auditors.

In addition to the IT and financial industries, many companies in the manufacturing, Internet of Things, art and other industries have begun to deploy blockchain content, trying to use blockchain technology to inject new vitality into traditional industries.

The popularity of the blockchain industry has stimulated the growth of talents in the industry, and various countries hope to find new economic growth points with the help of blockchain. From the perspective of talent distribution, the United States accounts for 25%, India 7%, and the United Kingdom 6%. Most of the American talents are concentrated in the New York area (24%) and the San Francisco Bay Area (21%). The relevant talent base in China is relatively small, mainly concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai. Therefore, many colleges and universities have opened their own blockchain courses to follow this surge.

What courses do you need to take to be in block chain industry

At present, there are no colleges and universities that offer blockchain professional degrees. If you want to be in blockchain industry, for undergraduates, in addition to specialized blockchain courses, learning more basic courses will lay a better foundation for the future. For graduate students or doctoral students, the direction needs to be much clearer. Whether it is encryption, security, or finance, it is more important to choose a research institute with strong strength in the corresponding field. Courses are not the point.

1. computer science

The essence of blockchain is a distributive ledger. Whether it is PoW, PoS, or DPoS, distributed systems cannot be bypassed. Therefore, if you are interested in public chain construction, computer science is a necessary base. Similarly, if you want to engage in blockchain development in the future, whether it is smart contract development or conventional front-end and back-end development, computer science can also provide the most basic training.

2. Information Engineering

Every user in the blockchain network is anonymous, and the decentralization feature causes that once the network is hacked, it will have a great impact on the entire public chain. Every year, a large number of networks are attacked with user assets are damaged. In view of the extremely high value of digital assets and the theft of assets only through computer technology, the security issues in the blockchain are particularly important, including identity verification, key management, data privacy, etc.. In this regard, information engineering majors can provide systematic security knowledge education.

3. economics

Crypto assets and economic systems are the hottest spots in the current blockchain industry. The mainstream economic models tend to be homogenized, and the emerging gameplay represented by pledge mining and liquidity mining can hardly be called rigorous in its essence. Talents in economics are of great help to the theoretical study of virtual economic systems and the construction of specific models.

4. Art

The popularity of NFT in 2021 will bring new possibilities to art. Now digital art has become an important component of NFT, and bringing traditional art into the virtual world has become a new growth point. The concept of art has always changed with the times, and this is one of the physical industries that is most closely integrated with crypto technology.

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