Best Universities for Blockchain 2022: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) is banking big on the future of blockchain technology. This year, the Australian-based university ranks 18th on CoinDesk’s Best Universities for Blockchain 2022.

This piece is part of CoinDesk's Education Week

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The university’s Blockchain Innovation Hub, a research center funneled primarily through its Digital Economy Business Lab, coordinates projects between industry partners and students.

Projects typically look to provide systems that can deal with real-world problems. In the past, the Hub has supported projects such as the Future of the Digital CBD, the advancement of opportunities and disruptors for real estate and the use of decentralized finance (DeFi) to alleviate poverty.

The Innovation Hub has collaborated with 40 industry partners that span across different fields. In the past, it has worked with tech company IBM, consulting giant Deloitte, crypto exchange Coinbase and even Australia's “living archive,” the National Film and Sound Archive.

By way of its postgraduate programs, RMIT and the Innovation Hub offer students the opportunity to earn a master’s degree in Blockchain Enabled Business. Fees vary and can change based on the timeline students opt to undertake, which can be between 1.5 years or three years. International students pay an estimated total of AU$43,200, or about US$29,030, while domestic or in-state students pay about AU$33,600, roughly US$22,579.

A graduate student who recently earned a certificate in Blockchain Enabled Business, told CoinDesk the program was a “really good support system to have around for beginners to learn and also a platform for intermediaries to have [to] enhance their skills, such as hackathons.”

Separately, RMIT’s Hub, in collaboration with the Digital Finance CRC, provides PhD students with a scholarship, roughly AU$60,000 annually on a pro rata basis, for their work on a project based on the tokenization of assets, or innovations in DeFi more generally.