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19 December 2018 at 21:30
Academics also love blockchain.
SSRN – an academic research repository owned by the publishing company of scientific, technical and medical information Elsevier – concludes that FinTech "is the fastest growing research area [its] platform. "Data from a study recently published by the company reveals that the most popular works on SSRN deal with topics related to blockchain and cryptocurrency, such as bitcoins and initial coin offerings (ICOs).
The study analyzes the download data of the platform between August 2016 and August 2018, as well as the research data between March 6 and August 21, 2018. In the space of two years, the topics "bitcoin", "blockchain", "cryptocurrency", and "ICO" has collected over half a million downloads of documents. In addition, preprints related to FinTech (or unformatted and unconditional research scripts provided by the authors) exceeded 660,000 document downloads in the same time frame.
Other popular research topics on SSRN have been eclipsed by blockchain over the past two years. For example, the big data research accounted for only 160,000 downloads of paper material and the scholarship for fake news was less than 50,000.
Distributed by continent, North America was the most prolific in terms of FinTech research, responsible for 43% of 1,468 related documents uploaded to SSRN in 2018. North America also saw the largest number of cryptocurrency-related searches uploads during # 39; contributing 50% of all ICO documents.
Europe has lagged slightly, although the continent has also seen considerable research into these subjects. Asian researchers, however, accounted for 8.1 percent of the blockchain-related SSRN documents during 2018, with only 1.2 percent of that piece from China.
Gregg Gordon, CEO of SSRN, commented on the results of the study:
"Looking at the world of research in 2018, we have seen that research on fintech is in a league of its own: no other area of research has equaled the rapid growth of topics like bitcoin and blockchain. This explosion in research has coincided with the very early implementation of the MiFID II regulation (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive 2) which could explain this increase ".
The recent analysis by SSRN demonstrates the point of support of the blockchain in the academic world. Not only are companies attracted to cryptospace, university researchers are also. This trend is not surprising considering the academic nature of blockchain development: teams publish white papers to describe their research and proposed systems, so teams continue to experiment with their ideas. The development pipeline, from white paper to proof of concept, is a family process.
Whether we look at the white papers for Ethereum, liberal radicalism, or any other project / concept, there is an academic thread woven into all of them. In fact, many of the authors of these articles have PhDs or are heavily engaged in research.
The SSRN study, therefore, serves more as a reminder of the fact that the academic world is welcome to cryptospace as projects focused on the business. Although requests for practical cases based on adoption are understandable (and probably necessary to promote further investment in technology), technological development is still partly supported by scholarship – and is therefore influenced by the whims of the academic world. This encrypted winter, let us remember that progress, especially when it refers to the overturning of an entire social structure, takes time.
Dani Putney is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He graduated in English at the University of Nevada, in Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his spare time, he writes poetry, plays the piano and dances on fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.
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