Looking Backward to Build the Future: How Academia Is Shifting Its Blockchain Focus

Philip Schlump, a professor of computer science at the University of Wyoming, teaches a course called Blockchain Design and Programming through the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

"We need to teach why it's used and learn to contextualize it in terms of how it fits into a project. Why blockchain over a database?".

Who and what are we designing for? What are the future consequences of our actions? How does blockchain fit in?

In some ways, Kim's statement is reminiscent of the ICO boom in 2017, when much lip service was paid to leveraging blockchain to solve everyday problems, many of which may not have actually needed a blockchain-based solution.

Kim's focus is on using blockchain to find new channels for lawyers to create value that will benefit the legal industry at large.

Our world may be smaller than ever, but blockchain has destroyed so many barriers, and tied us so tightly together, that a 'small world' is no longer an adequate metaphor.

Juels thinks about design from the other side of the glass: how ought we build our world to best capture the potential of blockchain? To this end, the IC3 represents movement in the right direction for blockchain in academia.

"A global, interdisciplinary organization devoted to the study of blockchain is quite a feat," I said, and Juels paused, staring into space as one does when they consider how much there is left to do.

We've moved from thinking about how blockchain can circumvent existing infrastructure to thinking about how we might make it work within the confines of existing infrastructure.

Recent scholarship suggests that blockchain may be an interesting way to, say, disrupt public company ownership structures - but maybe the very idea of a public corporation is less applicable in our future than it was in our past.