The problem with teaching crypto in a university setting is your lesson plans can quickly become out of date almost the moment you write them, Neal Davis, a professor on leave from the University of Illinois, said. That’s probably true for most things in tech.

“The problem that crypto education faces is that it's a very fast-moving field and things are going to rot very quickly,” Davis said. Still, if academia wants to have any relevance at all within this fast-emerging industry, it needs to find ways to stay up-to-date.

This interview is part of CoinDesk's "Education Week."

“You know, go build a DALL-E [AI-generated digital art platform] course – Stable Diffusion is everywhere,” he added, referring to the artificial intelligence tools that were announced last month. Davis might also add Urbit, the controversial computer infrastructure platform, to that list.

And indeed, he did. In 2020, Davis became the first U.S. professor to teach a computer science class dedicated to Urbit. Urbit is a wildly ambitious attempt to rebuild the internet from the ground up.

Unlike the server-client paradigm that dominates modern computing, Urbit uses public key cryptography to enable anyone to run their own servers. If decentralized finance (DeFi) is removing middlemen from finance, Urbit wants to remove middlemen from anything you can do with a computer, from email to logins.