Best Universities for Blockchain 2022: Where In the World Is the Most Research Being Produced?

Asia dominates the global blockchain research landscape in 2022. This story is part of CoinDesk's Education Week.

AccessTimeIconSep 26, 2022 at 11:48 a.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 6:04 p.m. UTC
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CoinDesk’s 2022 Best Universities for Blockchain Rankings, which CoinDesk announced this week, examines a university’s blockchain educational infrastructure using four key metrics: campus blockchain offerings, scholarly impact, employment and industry outcomes and academic reputation.

This piece is part of CoinDesk's Education Week

To get a more granular view of the blockchain ecosystem, we mapped out specific datasets to see what insights we could glean from individual dimensions of our research. One of the most interesting was research paper concentration. When looking at where research is being published, Asia dominates the landscape – and it’s not even close. Sixty percent of the top 10 paper producers are located in Asia, and out of the 24 Asian schools that are in the top-100 paper producers, only seven of them are outside of the top 50.

When taking this more holistic view of research, the U.S. arguably falls short of expectations with a grand total of zero schools in the top-20 paper producers. The first U.S. school to appear on the list is MIT at #23, and only four other U.S. schools even crack the top 50 (at #36, #38, #46 and #47).

In terms of regions punching far above their weight in scholarly impact, Oceania, and more specifically Australia, has a strong showing in scholarly impact. Five Australian schools show up in the top 20 schools by research paper publications, about half the rate of Asia despite having less than 2% of the population (an imperfect metric, but a fascinating one). Schools like University of New South Wales and University of Technology, Sydney are in the top 10 schools by paper publications, with UNSW registering as second overall, beaten only by Hong Kong Polytechnic University.


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Lecturer/researcher, Stanford University/MIT


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