The University of Nicosia’s CEO, Antonis Polemitis, alongside the Blockchain Initiative Coordinators, Professors George Giaglis and Soulla Louca, attended the premier blockchain technology summit in the world, Consensus 2017, in New York City.

The University of Nicosia (UNIC) is, by most measures, the leading university globally in the digital currency and blockchain field. UNIC has long considered blockchain technology to be a fundamental technological breakthrough with significant financial and societal implications and selected it as one of its three interdisciplinary priorities across all schools and departments of the university.   In particular, the objective is to help students, businesses and governments develop a holistic view of the technical, business, legal and societal implications of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies in order to help build a better societal future.

In this spirit, UNIC has constantly broken new ground in academia, being the first university in the world to:

  1. Teach a university-level course on cryptocurrency (January 2014)
  2. Offer an accredited academic degree program – a Master of Science in Digital Currency – taught online in English (March 2014)
  3. Have graduated students from an accredited academic degree program (June 2016)
  4. Accept Bitcoin for tuition for any degree program at the university (October 2013)
  5. Issue academic certificates onto the Bitcoin blockchain, using its own in-house software platform (September 2014)

This leading role in academia has been recognised by blockchain industry publications in their evaluation of UNIC’s position among universities involved in the field – CoinDesk (#1, 2016), the Merkle (#1, 2017).

Joining over 2500 participants and 100+ key industry speakers, Polemitis and Giaglis chaired and moderated the Academic Workshop panels alongside other global leading universities including Cornell, Duke, MIT, George Mason, UCL, University of Illinois and Ledger (the academic journal in the space). Topics of discussion included research, education and partnerships with the blockchain industry.

Consensus 2017 is the 3rd annual blockchain technology summit to be organised by CoinDesk, the world leader in news and information on digital currencies like bitcoin and its underlying technology – the blockchain.