Why is it that professors interested in cryptocurrencies so often build their own blockchains? This isn’t a setup for a joke. In the crypto milieu,
Why is it that professors interested in cryptocurrencies so often build their own blockchains? This isn’t a setup for a joke. In the crypto milieu, there’s a particular type of public figure who is often known as much for his or her academic accomplishments as for being a supreme coder.
Take Cornell University’s Emin Gün Sirer , one of the founders of Avalanche, a layer one, or base, blockchain looking to complement and compete with Ethereum. There’s Dawn Song of the University of California, Berkeley, and the privacy-focused chain Oasis. David Mazieres, a tenured professor at Stanford University, helped build both Ripple and Stellar.
This post is part of CoinDesk’s Best Universities for Blockchain package. See our ranking of 230 schools here.
“If you want to develop new capabilities, then either you have to work within those constraints,” like the scalability or cultural issues of existing blockchains or start from a “clean slate,” Song said in a phone call. It’s less a matter of ego, than expertise.
The reason the earlier question sounds like it might have a punchline is because of the notorious anti-establishment mentality in crypto. People who build (mostly) open-source protocols and tools might just be hardwired to be skeptical of centralized institutions – including banks, governments and the media.
Said another way, if “a wallet is your resume” then credentials matter less. Whether you’re an Ivy League dropout, a former Goldman Sachs exec or an unemployable stoner, you can make it in crypto so long as you bring something to the table.
Song, 46, a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the type who heard, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” and decided to do both. After taking some time off to focus on Oasis, she’s now back full-time at Berkeley, teaching a massive open online course ( MOOC) on blockchains and privacy tech.
“I spend my time doing research, writing papers, brushing up on privacy and also teaching in the space,” she said. It’s hard to see where she and the other crypto “educator-entrepreneurs” find the time. Or the will.
The university, in particular in crypto, is often derided as an out-of-touch institution. Although academics, funded by government defense spending, were essential to building the cryptographic primitives on which the current web stands, crypto is showing how the next generation of the web often occurs outside the ivory gates.
That was one of the central issues CoinDesk wrestled with when producing this year’s Top Universities for Blockchain ranking. What’s the use of a computer science degree when you can learn Solidity on your own? But that’s only one way to look at it.
“I mean, I think the academy is anti-establishment,” Stellar’s Mazieres said over Zoom. Today, big tech companies Apple, Google and Facebook represent the “walled gardens” of computing. “If you want to do something that these companies aren’t, or that isn’t good for their bottom line, then you pretty much have to do it in academia,” he said.
It’s the university system or a startup, he added, “but [universities] don’t have the same sort of like profit constraints.”
Read more: The Top Universities for Blockchain by CoinDesk 2021
Of course, crypto has its own economic foundations that encourage research and development. Launching a “commodity money” – like bitcoin (BTC) or ether (ETH), used to secure and pay for the underlying blockchain computation – is like issuing your own grant. Crypto protocols like Zcash have found ways to deploy and integrate cryptographic techniques like zk-snarks that were once only theorized, and have the money to advance that research. Likewise, a host of wallet companies have made commercial use of similarly-experimental multi-party computation (MPC).
For Mazieres, academia represents another path for builders looking to reinvent the world through cryptocurrencies. The peer-review process may be slow, but a professorship provides insulation from market volatility, a modicum of job security and the benefit of being surrounded by some of the smartest people on the planet.
“It’s very hard for me to imagine leaving Stanford before I retire,” he said. In fact, it’s the same interest in “egalitarian” technologies that keeps his feet in the private world of cryptocurrencies and the somewhat-democratic university system. “Certainly one of the draws is the fact that I can do everything open source and publish everything,” he said.
But the profit motive is strong.
Avalanche, the smart contract blockchain, is an almost $50 billion enterprise. Noted venture firms Three Arrows Capital and Polychain Capital recently led a $230 million funding round into Avalanche Foundation, a major organization that builds and maintains the blockchain.
In a conversation last month, Ava Labs founder Gun Sirer revealed he’s stepping away from Cornell, where he’s taught for the past two decades. It’s there…
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