For as long as it's existed. People have been talking about blockchain's potential to change
the world, but how is that change currently happening? Well, we're here at the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University to take a closer look. This is where the next generation of blockchain
experts are being trained and possibly where the biggest changes of all are going to be dreamed up.
As 2022 comes to an end the crypto winter everyone was hoping to see the back of.
Looks likely to continue for some time yet. Job cuts have been made worse by the FTX scandal,
while investors continue to count the cost and the threat of contagion looms everywhere.
But bear markets are for building and for blockchain. That means investing in coders, not
just in code. However, finding the right talent to do that is proving a problem. According to a
recent report by LinkedIn and OKX, engineering and development skills are in high demand but
short supply. Binance is among those trying to change this by offering scholarships to certain
blockchain education programs. Formal education institutions are becoming an increasingly vital
part of that, however, and Hong Kong is helping lead the way for institutions in the city. Appear
in Coindesk's top 50 universities for blockchain in 2022 and Hong Kong's Polytechnic University
or Poly U is at number one. PolyU established a blockchain and crypto lab in 2018 and started a
Master of Science in Blockchain Technology course this year. Daniel Luo is the program's leader.
Recent years have witnessed the faster development of blockchain web3,
metaverse and virtual asset and so on. Meanwhile, many governments have announced many policies to
further boost this development. Actually, yesterday I attend a forum discussing about
the fintech talent shortage in Hong Kong. So that is why we think this is
the right time to set up this program to deliver comprehensive education on blockchain technology.
There have been growing calls for industry focus to shift towards building blockchain technology
with strong real life use cases, and this is where institutions like poly are concentrating. The
university's blockchain course covers everything from network layer and consensus protocols to
smart contracts and applications, And Daniel says they think it's vital teaching response
to the latest developments. That includes research at Poly U's virtual reality lab,
shifting to include Metaverse projects. Work being done There currently includes reminiscence therapy
designed to help those with dementia work on an education. Metaverse has already helped
form a basis for a move next year to offer a master's program in Metaverse technology.
Here, we would like to emphasize both the education and the research,
and so I introduce our MSSP program focusing on the education. But on the other side,
we have the Research Center for Blockchain Technology. So the research center will also
provide opportunities for our students to participate in the R&D projects.
A key blockchain project for students and teachers has been poly use green coin. It
allows anyone in the university to get rewards for helping sustainability on campus. That includes
things like recycling. The green coins are a currency used as a reward, redeemable currently
at the campus café. The idea is to move towards using collectible NFTs to further incentivize
students to behave more sustainably. Former student and now research assistant Professor
Shan Jiang says it's crucial that teaching around this technology be brought into a formal setting.
Without this course, the students can definitely analyze some protocols and
develop some algorithms. But the issue is that they cannot do it in a formal way so
they can guarantee that their algorithms are secure enough. But with this course,
they are empowered with the knowledge to analyze the security of their developed algorithms. This
fundamental thing can make the blockchain ecosystem worldwide to be more healthy.
Hong Kong's University of Science and Technology also offers a variety of blockchain related
courses. It announced plans for a metaverse based campus this summer. The director of their
crypto fintech lab told Forkast The industry is what's driving demand for this type, of course.
From the practical view, at least in my experience. We very often
get contacts from industry requiring or requesting talents in blockchain area,
and it's very difficult to find them actually, you know, in industry, even within the university,
even within the university, sometimes it is still difficult to find blockchain developers.
The same is true at PolyU. Daniel says the industry
comes to him looking for talent that's already familiar with blockchain tech.
Are already many companies contact me asking me to recommend students
to their companies. For example. Us already provides some internships to
our students. Our program has a lot of high quality applications and industry
partners. We also like to provide scholarships to our MSC students.
Given courses like these are all so new there are few working in blockchain with
formal qualifications for it. And Andy Liu initially studied business intelligence at HKUST,
but he got hooked on blockchain once he understood the technology
behind Bitcoin. He now runs its blockchain academy, which is aiming to broaden access
to blockchain education. Their recent build camp program was open to anyone.
This time we got around 2500 people signed up, so which is quite good number and a majority of them
come from Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China and 20% of them come from US and UK from
their own. We find out that two things. One is that talents they love what? Three, they want
to learn more. And also, the second thing is that there are not such platforms that they can learn.
Shan, meanwhile, says that since he started teaching,
he's learned the importance of accommodating students from a variety of backgrounds.
So some of them are of computer science background and some of
them are of financial background. Some of them don't even know programing.
That's the truth. And I need to balance the teaching of the fundamental theory
and also some practice practical program programing and application development.
As blockchain industries confront uncertainties in regulation, technology and security,
it's the classrooms of places like this that are going to become vital to building the future.
It has been a momentous 12 months for the crypto sector and we at Forkast have been
trying our hardest to cover everything that's been going on for you. If you like
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