How business schools teach cryptocurrencies

Three years ago, David Yermack, professor of finance at New York University Stern School of Business, helped start a new course dealing with cryptocurrencies and blockchain. In the course of these three years, the course became so popular that David Yermack has now been to many of the world’s top universities reading lectures on cryptocurrencies, including Rotterdam, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Basel.

According to Prof. Yermack, there had been a growing demand for such a course focused on blockchain and its taxing, so he decided to launch his one-of-a-kind course, which soon became immensely popular.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain

Cryptocurrencies, including the well-known bitcoin, which has recently been valued at more than $10,000, are powered by a shared ledger technology called blockchain. The price of bitcoin increased by 13 times just in 2017, Financial Times reports.

Blockchain technology makes sharing encrypted data between organizations possible. It allows the data to be completely fraud-proof. According to experts, professionals in this sphere are badly needed in all industries and sectors, finances being the most prominent one, but including such areas as retail.

According to Oliver Bussmann, a former UBS bank (Switzerland) CIO and currently a blockchain startup advisor, cryptocurrencies are rapidly disrupting world markets and even industries. He believes that tokenomics will shape the world of financial services as soon as five years in the future.

Large companies are known to have avoided bitcoin like the plague, due to its infamous criminal connections. Conversely, now they have understood that this cryptocurrency has a vast untapped potential in the area of financial transactions and tracking.

According to Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase CEO, although the existence of bitcoin is quite clearly a fraud, blockchain itself is a very useful technology. David Yermack backs his words up by saying that blockchain is set up to be a game-changer in most industries and has a market-disrupting potential leading to dramatic alterations.

The growing popularity of the blockchain course

When the new course started, only several dozen students signed up for it. Now there are more than a hundred and counting. Next year, Prof. Yermack expects to have more than 300 students enrolled in his course, and is planning to move it to a bigger classroom which accommodates 350 students.

The fluctuating nature of cryptocurrencies makes the course material highly agile and flexible. To keep up with the recent developments in the field of tokenomics, you’d have to read up on it every day. Now, NYU is planning to offer an undergrad course in cryptocurrencies. However, it experiences a lack of teachers for accomplishing such a task.

Prof. Yermack is sure that in five years, every top university will read a course on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. They would do it even earlier, but there is not enough staff available who could give such a course.

For finance and business majors, courses in cryptocurrency and blockchain may become the most popular among all the others. The only thing holding universities back is inability to find the teachers ready to give such a highly controversial, modern and contested course.

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