Yale increases investment in blockchain research

Yale, which was ranked 34th in Coindesk’s 2022 Best Universities for Blockchain, has invested significantly in the fast-growing field.

Alex Ye

12:08, 12 October 2022

Staff Reporter

Zoe Berg, Senior Photographer

This time last year, Yale was not ranked in CoinDesk’s Best Universities for Blockchain. A year later, the university places 34. overallon par with Harvard and other major universities around the world.

The report’s findings recognize Yale’s recent significant investments in blockchain research, including the hiring of four new blockchain experts to the computer science faculty, — Ben Fisch, Charalampos Papamanthou, Katerina Sotiraki and Fan Zhang — one of whom is leading a project that has received a $5.75 million grant to develop blockchain.

“In recent years, blockchain, as an interdisciplinary field, has spurred a tremendous amount of development in distributed systems and cryptography and their intersection,” said Fisch. “This is also why it is such a fascinating academic subject, because it ties together so many different fields, not only from computer science, but also from economics, law and politics. Yale has a very unique combination of strengths in all these different areas, especially at this time.”

In August, Yale blockchain researchers accepted a $5.75 million grant from the Algorand Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on the development of blockchain technology.

The grant will support PAVE: A Center for Privacy, Accountability, Verification and Economics of Blockchain Systems, which will be led by Papamanthou. PAVE will bring together an interdisciplinary team of experts from four institutions – Yale, Columbia University, City College of New York and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, with Yale as the lead institution – to advance research on blockchain systems.

Apart from the technical agenda, PAVE will also host hackathons, symposiums and blockchain summer schools.

The expansion of blockchain research at Yale coincides with the emergence of the blockchain technology market. The value of blockchain technology in the banking, finance and insurance sector is expected to grow by $4.02 billion between 2021 and 2026, according to Technavio. The Technavio study found that easier access to technology and disintermediation of banking services will create more growth opportunities within the industry.

Papamanthou believes the hires recognized the importance of blockchain, and that the university more generally has “recognized the interdisciplinary nature of the blockchain space.” He emphasized that the university provides opportunities to explore the blockchain industry, for example interdisciplinary majors such as computer science and economics.

Papamanthou spotlighted the newly established Roberts Innovation Fund created by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which assists blockchain projects that can be commercialized through funding and guidance.

An increasing number of students are interested in the blockchain field, according to Mariam Alaverdian ’23, president of the Yale Blockchain Club.

Alaverdian explained that due to the many applications of blockchain technology — from personal identity security to healthcare to money transfers — the emergence of blockchain in our lives is “inevitable.” She added that the Yale Blockchain Club has seen interested students come from a variety of backgrounds, with some having no prior exposure and others already having startups in the space.

“The Yale Blockchain Club started last spring and we got a lot of attention from Yale students and alumni,” Alaverdian wrote in an email to the News. “We had 600 people sign up to our mailing list in a couple of weeks … there’s definitely a lot of demand from Yale students for educational materials and guidance.”

As the blockchain industry has continued to grow, Yale has been a “hard advocate” for blockchain research and development, Papamanthou noted.

Papamanthou explained that because Yale’s faculty now consists of “leaders in

distributed computing and cryptography,” the potential blockchain innovation at Yale could be “unprecedented.”

“It’s amazing that Yale has hired two phenomenal professors, Ben Fisch and Fan Zhang, whose research focuses on aspects of blockchain,” said Roshan Palakkal ’25, a student in Frontiers of Blockchain Research, a course taught by Fisch. “Yale CS is not usually known for being the best, but I think the new classes and faculty have positioned it to be one of the best universities for blockchain, with a lot of potential for interdisciplinary collaboration in areas like economics, global affairs, and public policy .”

Papamanthou added that students interested in blockchain have access to a variety of courses across the computer science and economics departments, as well as at the Yale School of Management and Yale Law School.

According to Fisch, from a data science perspective, Yale is educationally competitive with any other university in blockchain.

“I will offer a course in the spring that is comparable to the blockchain course offered by Stanford,” Fisch said. “And the research seminar that I teach now is unusual at other universities, as it really goes in depth at a higher level in all the latest research topics that are currently being worked on.”

The Yale Computer Science Department is located at 51 Prospect St.