Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation will launch country’s first master program for blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The university is following an example of UK’s Oxford and American Stanford Universities in this sphere, trying to create the similar program for the Russian audience. Russia’s Central Bank and one of the top IT developer companies, Diasoft came together to help shape the new educational program for the university.
Financial University is planning to provide courses on: “Blockchain platforms”, "Mathematical Foundations of Cryptography and Cryptocurrency", "Cybersecurity in the field of finance", "Money in the digital economy”, "Business models in digital markets", “Innovations in the payment systems”.
Also, students will be offered lectures on legal disciplines that are specifically tailored towards the blockchain and cryptocurrency issues. The university notes, that the subject would not be an easy one, as students will have to acknowledge both international and domestic norms which are constantly changing, depending on the latest precedents.
Also, the Financial university has recently announced that it will become the first university in the country to store and provide the data regarding the issued diplomas on the blockchain. All diplomas issued by the University during the last 10 years will be available for authenticity checks on the institution's web page starting September 2018.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Such a service will allow potential employers to verify the authenticity of documents provided by the candidates. The information stored in such a database is almost impossible to change without being detected.
Currently, the procedure of authenticity confirmation takes several days because of the human factor, as the special department at the university is responsible for all official inquiries. Once the new system will be launched, it will reduce the waiting time to just several seconds (if no seal is needed, and it is not needed in 90% of cases)
For each diploma, a unique identifier was created based on the information about the student's full name, the number of the document and other data. The diploma is then encrypted using SHA-256 algorithm. Therefore, a unique diploma hashtag was created, said the announcement.
The idea to store graduation diplomas information on the blockchain first came to students of International Finance Faculty.
“The idea has been just beneath the surface but [they] found a quite sophisticated solution to the issue”, said Andrei Varnavsky, Head of the Financial University Blockchain Laboratory.
U.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) uses a distributed database for storing and monitoring diplomas since October 2017, with more than a hundred of its graduates receiving blockchain diplomas. The difference between the approaches of MIT and the Financial University is that the first one creates a verified and unalterable digital version of diploma - with the aim to protect intellectual rights, while the Russian university has created a public database with the purpose of providing the access to the diploma data while protecting it cryptographically. The service announced by the Financial University might be also adopted by other educational institutions soon.
"We are innovators in this case, but, we are already communicating with several universities that are ready to create a protected single public base of diplomas (when the solution will face the stage of commercial exploitation)," said the head of the Blockchain Laboratory in the interview to Insider.pro