Golden Gate University launches new Blockchain Lab

With the help of funding from the Filecoin Foundation, Golden Gate University’s Blockchain Law for Social Good Center has announced the creation of a new blockchain technology lab to teach students more about decentralized storage, Web3 and blockchain technologies.

According to a press release, the university’s new Filecoin Foundation Blockchain Academy Lab will host meetings and training seminars that help “expand understanding of open and decentralized technologies, and how they can be leveraged for good” as student interest in cryptocurrencies and other related things. emerging technology fields continue to grow in higher editions.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen a growing interest in the technology that powers cryptocurrency and Web3,” Michele Neitz, founder of the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center, said in the statement. “As a Bay Area law school, we want to provide our students—and our larger community—with the resources they need to learn about these innovative, emerging technologies and their socially beneficial uses.”

Marta Belcher, president and chairman of the Filecoin Foundation, said Public technology that the laboratory will provide “authorities, professors and many more with the resources they need to understand decentralized technology”, as well as how that technology can be used for social good.

The announcement added that the lab plans to create specialized programs to train professors, including one specifically aimed at colleges, to teach about decentralized technology and other related topics, as well as monthly blockchain and Web3 workshops for state and local government officials. The lab will also launch its Teaching Fellow program, which aims to prepare the next generation of blockchain experts working in legal education.

“One of the biggest barriers to adopting new technology is education,” Belcher said in an email Public technology. “We want people to understand how centralized intermediaries can act as single points of failure and undermine privacy and expression. We also want people to see how decentralizing the web can help preserve humanity’s most important information.”

Belcher believes that “blockchain technology will do for value what the Internet did for information,” as the new field of technology evolves and develops thousands of blockchain platforms for functions such as paying royalties to musicians, compensating people for using their data, paying journalists for every view of an article and encourage consumers to, among other things, use renewable energy.

“One of the most exciting things about blockchain technology is that it creates the possibility to program money, which can happen immediately and automatically without intermediaries – even across national borders. These types of transactions would be unsustainable using traditional payment systems,” she said in the email. “On the decentralized web, multiple nodes can fail without the entire system falling apart. When data is distributed instead of platforms, users can control their data and choose where and with whom to share them.”

“It would have been a mistake in 1995 to think we understood Internet usage in 2022,” Belcher later continued. “While blockchain is in its early days, the use of cryptocurrency could be just as expansive.”

Neitz said the lab will bring together students from around the world and from underserved student populations that are underrepresented in technology via virtual events and conferences. She said one of the main goals of the lab and the center in general is “to educate populations that the tech sector has traditionally ignored.”

“The partnership between the Filecoin Foundation and the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center enables us to achieve both goals by building diverse communities of blockchain champions and creating future leaders from various sectors who understand and appreciate the benefits of open, decentralized technologies. In turn, those trained by the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center will educate their communities, communicating the benefits of these new technologies to a wider audience that will continue to grow,” Neitz said in an email to Public technology.

“With these goals in mind, the lab will provide a physical space with state-of-the-art technology for in-person training and meetings in San Francisco and online events with a global reach,” she continued. “We expect to host government officials and policy makers, professors from law schools and other educational institutions, lawyers and industry leaders, and students from all walks of life.”

Neitz said the center and lab have recently received training requests from government entities to help educate and update staff and officials on key issues and current legal and ecosystem developments as the lab looks to expand in the coming years. Among other plans, Neitz said, the lab will host its first annual conference Oct. 20 and 21, before the start of the Teaching Fellow program in 2023.

– We have a great interest in society [in the new lab]Neitz said in the email. “There is significant momentum and growth ahead of us!”