Wharton School To Accept Cryptocurrency As Payment Method

NDTV Profit Desk

29 Oct 2021, 11:56 AM IST

Wharton School will use Coinbase Global Inc. to accept digital-asset payments

Cryptocurrency is no more an alien mode of exchange these days. From entrepreneurial giants to various national governments, many people are trying to incorporate digital currency as an accepted mode of transaction in business. A not-so-popular space where cryptocurrency has begun to thrive is in educational institutions. Many such institutes have begun to embrace digital assets as a means of payment. A new addition to this list is the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It's one of the top business schools in the US and it plans to accept cryptocurrency as tuition fees for its new executive education programme.

The Ivy League institution has decided to accept coins such as Bitcoins as a payment method for its online blockchain and digital assets program. The Wharton School, which is scheduled to open in January, offers the online course at $3,800. The Philadelphia-based business school is supposed to be crowded by several thousand students every year.

Wharton School has announced that it will use Coinbase Global Inc. to accept digital-asset payments. Coinbase Global Inc. is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US. The school is working with Prysm Group in order to develop the programme.

A report in Bloomberg quoted Guido Molinari, the managing partner at Prysm Group, as saying, “It's a program about blockchain and digital assets, we felt that we should talk the talk and walk the walk.”

The executive education course will have Kevin Werbach as the main instructor. Werbach has been teaching the fundamentals of blockchain and crypto at the school since 2018.

The University of Pennsylvania made it to the news regarding another association with cryptocurrency earlier this year. In May, the university received $5 million from an anonymous donor as digital assets. This was the largest cryptocurrency gift in the university's history.

The Wharton School boasts of numerous alums who are presently boosting the crypto market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk graduated from the school in 1997 and has been a strong force in driving price swings of meme coins like Dogecoin. He has also pushed his companies Tesla and SpaceX to buy Bitcoin for their corporate treasuries. Another graduate from the school is Arthur Hayes, who started the BitMex exchange for Bitcoin exchanges.