Best Universities for Blockchain 2022: University College London
With four blockchain graduate programs, the top U.K. school on our list lands at No. 7. This story is part of CoinDesk's Education Week.
Sep 19, 2023 at 2:36 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/WW7KLU44KZFVZLXUZ5TZVLZ5FQ.jpg)
The Wilkins Building, University College London (David Iliff/Wikimedia)
The Wilkins Building, University College London (David Iliff/Wikimedia)
University College London (UCL) has long featured in leading rankings of the world’s top universities. The most recent QS World University Rankings, for instance, placed it eighth, just behind its traditional domestic rivals, the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and Imperial College London.
For blockchain then, UCL punches above its weight. According to CoinDesk’s 2022 Best Universities ranking, it comes above all other British contenders, in seventh place overall, the same position it occupied a year ago.
This piece is part of CoinDesk's Education Week
2022 Rank (+/- 2021) | University Name | Total Score | Courses | Region | Regional Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
7 (no change) | University College London | 77 | 16 | Europe | 2 |
Read the Full List: Best Universities for Blockchain 2022
Our research reveals a full range of crypto-related programs and activities on campus, including two blockchain research centers, two active student clubs that held nine events in the 2019-2022 period, and four graduate degree programs. No other school in our sample of 240 universities had as many blockchain graduate degrees.
Founded by Professor Paolo Tasca and Professor Tomaso Aste, the UCL Center for Blockchain Technologies has been investigating distributed ledger technology since 2015. The group now claims to be the largest research center on blockchain technologies in the world by number of associates.
On the student club front, UCL’s Blockchain Labs Society collaborates with similar groups at the London School of Economics and Imperial College London, conducting at least four events monthly with industry leaders and leading startups.
In addition, UCL offers 16 blockchain courses, primarily in computer science and engineering. The graduate programs are mostly in fintech: master of science in emerging digital technologies, master of science in financial technology, master of science in banking and digital finance, and master of science in venture capital and private equity with financial technology.
And its research output is prodigious. In the 2019-2022 period, its researchers published 186 blockchain academic papers, with 1,984 high-level citations in the academic press.
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Ben Schiller is CoinDesk's managing editor for features and opinion. Previously, he was editor-in-chief at BREAKER Magazine and a staff writer at Fast Company. He holds some ETH, BTC and LINK.
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