Brazil’s institution of higher education , Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), in São Paulo has delved into cryptocurrencies as the subject of the future and created its first Master’s degree in Cryptocurrency. Following the footsteps of leading universities in the world, Brazil is waking up to the need of hour to educate its students to the opportunities that blockchain and cryptocurrencies have to offer.
Taking a cue from Duke, Cornell and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which started classes recently and New York University which has been offering a course since 2014 in this filed, Ricardo Rochman, program coordinator at FGV, was quoted saying “It is a market with a profound lack of people with expertise. Cryptofinance has economic and financial fundamentals that are worth discussing, researched, and taught”.
It will be a new optional subject for students in Economics and is also being offered as an additional subject to the Derivatives class. The aim is to teach students about comparisons between cryptocurrencies and fiat money, Bitcoins, and market space for these assets. The idea is to also teach to make students aware of the usage and riskiness for portfolio management. As a professor at FEA-USP, Alan de Genaro mentioned that one of the biggest reason to teach this course to future professionals was to each “which factors are beneficial and which are not”.
South American countries are warming up to crytocurrencies and also doing their bit to increase awareness of the general public regarding their pros and cons. Recently, The Financial Stability Board (CEF) of Chile concluded that crytocurrencies and its innovations do not pose a threat to the economy. It was constituted as an association under Ministry of Finance with a mandate to understand the effects of cryptocurrencies on the economy.
Chile’s energy regulator National Energy Commission has even go so far as to adopt blockchain technology to certify the quality and stability of open data in the national energy sector.
There has been a push by economies of Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil to adopt the technologies around cryptocurrencies and blockchain to improve their stagnant traditional economies. The most popular exchanges in these countries are Bitso, MexBT and Volabit. On the contrary Bolivia has gone ahead with a contrarian stand.
With increasing uses of blockchain being devised on a daily basis, cryptocurrencies have less and less to fear on the future of their popoularity or trade.