(More coverage of the report can be found on Coindesk and Fortune.)

For us it's been fascinating to see the undeterred interest of students growing steadily throughout the Q4 '17 madness and subsequent bear market. We now count subscribers from over 100 institutions (that we can identify via their email address), including half of the top 50 universities. It's not surprising that also Google searches for relevant keywords don't seem to have followed the same pattern of market prices.

Now seeing universities themselves adapting to this emerging demand is even more fascinating. We can't really think of another subject that has made its way into university curricula so pervasively and in such a short time. If you can, let us know as it would be particularly interesting to draw some parallels. It probably helps that many of these academic institutions already had a bedrock of foundational classes in cryptography and active researchers in the fields of game theory or distributed systems, who are now presumably deeming crypto currencies and blockchain areas that deserve further academic attention.

Our friend Matt Stephenson from Planck, and most recently a PhD at Columbia University, put it succinctly when we asked for his perspective:

As always Twitter provided us a timely proof of that, with an emblematic exchange between Martin from Gnosis and Glen Weyl, researcher and professor at Princeton:

The particularly revealing takeaway from Coinbase report is the multi-disciplinary appeal of this subject across engineering, finance, law and social sciences departments, clearly showing the belief that it can have a profound impact on society in multiple industries and with the contribution from diverse disciplines.
 
“That interdepartmental approach may emerge as a hallmark of cryptocurrency and blockchain education, given the number of departments that are currently offering classes on the subject. 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 four percent were in social science departments such as anthropology, history, and political science.”

The other side of the coin is that there is such an invaluable goldmine of learning opportunities freely available to anyone online, and that in such a nascent industry there aren't in fact many "professors" yet. There's also a question around whether a rigid academic curricula can appropriately form students in such a fast-paced industry. But universities are no doubt pressured to satisfy students natural curiosity in order to gain and retain their attention. And once an ivy league university starts offering a blockchain course, you bet that others will be following suit at rapid pace.
Ultimately, even education is a ruthless marketplace where universities thrive by placing students into the job market, and therefore need to market what the job supply is after, perhaps at the cost of following the hype. David Gerard's sceptical piece about the Saïd Business School picks up on this theme. But it's undeniable that such skills are currently highly desirable across many industries, with law being singled out (unsurprisingly perhaps!):

“If you’re graduating from law school it’s a tough market these days. [...] However, the law students that are trained in blockchain, they don’t need to apply anywhere. People are just asking them to join their firms.”

One stat from the report that stood out is that international universities are somewhat lagging US ones. We noticed the same theme across our subscriber base, though we suspected it could be down to a cultural difference in the use of academic email addresses. The numbers from the report however seem to suggest there is a more fundamental trend behind it, and we can't quite figure out why:

“Only five of the 18 international universities on the list, or 27 percent [vs 42%], offer at least one class on blockchain or cryptocurrency. And only two — Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and National University of Singapore — offer more than one.”

Lastly, one number that made many headlines, but it's probably well within expectations given the general tech-savviness of students vs general population: 18% of the respondents own or have owned crypto currencies.

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If you are a student and want a platform to give your thoughts more reach in this industry, reach out to us. We'd be delighted to feature some of your work.

- Dash. Someone reached out after we commented on the social media rumours of Dash potential looming financial troubles last week. He wrote a detailed and well researched post (his 1st!) challenging that opinion. Gotta love this community.

- Filecoin. Finally an update after a long radio silence (they have been developing in a private codebase). It's very meaty. Mainnet launch now expected by Q2/3 of 2019.

- Square. It won a patent for a layer 2 type payment network that allows merchants to accept payments in any currency, including BTC. The impact that SQ will have on mass adoption of crypto currencies should not be underestimated.

- Institutional FOMO. BoA is the latest financial institution working on a custody solution for crypto assets, as suggested by a recent patent application. On the exchanges front, rumours are that the NASDAQ is preparing to go 'all-in' on crypto, pending regulatory guidance expected in Q1 2019.

- TRON/Bittorrent. The last episode of the saga is that as part of the acquisition it was agreed that TRON would invest $50K into Chia Networks. Details of the acquisition also suggest that Bram Cohen only made just over $10M from it.

- Apple store. Coinbase Wallet was forced to remove a NFT-based game from its iOS app because Apple...

- XRP army. If you are left with a bit of time to waste, scroll through this mind blowing scientific dissection of the XRP army Twitter graph. 

Curated on a Product Hunt collection!

(Courtesy of Tokendata)
$500M raised, mostly privately as usual. The largest raises (Hashgraph and tZERO) have been in the works for a long time, so they just happen to have closed this month. Otherwise the trend of the last 6-9 months continues.

The top 5:
1/ tZERO: Security Token Exchange ($134M)
2/ Hedera Hashgraph: Next-generation distributed public ledger ($100M)
3/ London Football Exchange: Football (soccer) community & marketplace ($71M)
4/ 4NEW: Energy trading platform ($45M)
5/ Grapevine: Database for healthcare data ($30M)

(we too had to Google London Football exchange)

Token Economy is written and curated by Stefano Bernardi & Yannick Roux.

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