As the technology behind bitcoin becomes more and more popular, a serious talent shortage occurs at present. Top universities across the world now provide numerous blockchain-based courses and resources.

According to the data from Lianta think tank, there are 27 universities offer blockchain course or tutorial classes worldwidely. From the distribution of these universities, China and the US called a draw with 8 universities for each while England owns 5. The rest of the universities are distributed in Cyprus, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

Most of the colleges that offer blockchain courses are elite schools. The Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and Central University of Finance and Economics in China; The Princeton, Stanford, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States; the Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom are all on the list.

At present, there are 6 educational institutions accept bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for tuition, four of them are America-based universities. All the 8 universities in China have claimed that they would not accept cryptocurrency for payments.

Chinese universities are cautious in opening blockchain courses and being a late starter but they are quite bold in the layout of research in this new technology. Most of universities in China choose to cooperate with the industry enterprises to build blockchain research institute which makes their research productions provide higher adaptability and practicability.

This month, Zhejiang University, one of China’s most prestigious elite school, offers its first course on blockchain and digital currency which can be seen as an epitome of the blockchain courses in China. The course will illustrate the principles, technology and applications of digital currency, and analyze the technical architecture of current mainstream blockchain platforms, for example, Ethereum and Hyperledger. In addition, blockchain use cases and the development trend are also included.

However, the available talent pool always lags far behind the demand when an emerging technology is in a developing stage. It would take 3 to 4 years to ease the talent shortage, thus, there is a pressing need to cultivate talent to boot the development of blockchain industry.