How are universities or colleges looking to use blockchain?

It's not a huge priority for the college that I'm at. It’s kind of on the back burner at the moment, but we are discussing it. We have a lot of good processing power that's on all the time but the students aren’t always using it, so I have my teams investigating whether we can mine cryptocurrencies in our downtime. Then the energy that we're already spending would go towards cryptocurrency mining and we can use it for things such as deficit reduction.

We're also looking at expanding our payments to cryptocurrencies, because we have a lot of international students. Some of them come from nations whose economies or official currencies are collapsing, so allowing them to purchase courses or tuition through cryptocurrencies creates an opportunity for those students that may not have had one otherwise. El Salvador, for example, has designated Bitcoin as legal tender. It could be a way for us to accommodate students that might not be able to pay in their traditional currencies.

Although it's a bit of a side project, we're exploring the possibility of having transcripts and education records on the blockchain as well. At many institutions you have to pay a $10 to $15 fee each time you want a transcript. We could have all of that data on the blockchain, including which courses you've done, certifications you've achieved, etc. Apart from that, donations are a key focus area in higher education. I know that in the United States, there's a company called The Giving Block that provides a lot of donation-based services. But it's very slim at the moment in Canada, so there are a few crypto exchanges that help out with some of that. Regulation in Canada is very immature at this point, so we don't know how to tax these things appropriately. There are a lot of unknowns and gray areas that we’re working through right now, but it is on the roadmap.