Starting from September 14, 2017, Lithuania’s Kazimieras Simonavičiaus University will be accepting payments in cryptocurrency. The university is the first to offer this way of payment for studies in Lithuania, and one of only a handful in the Baltic Sea region.

Students willing to pay for their studies in cryptocurrencies should contact the university’s administration and their payments will be accepted according to the exchange rate of the chosen currency. Using the www.spectrocoin.com service, the university can accept payments in Bitcoins, Ethereum, Dash and other unorthodox currencies.

The university’s Rector, Professor Arūnas Augustinaitis, says that the decision to accept the new currencies in a relatively straightforward step in the implementation of the institution’s overall strategy. “We believe that the university has to show the way for other science and education institutions as well as for business. Payments in cryptocurrencies are more convenient because of the speed and the price. Moreover, this is attractive for foreign students” believes Mr. Augustinaitis. The university also invites other universities and businesses to open up to new ways of thinking and doing business.

Although payments in cryptocurrencies have been around for the last decade, it’s an entirely new approach within education. There remain very few universities that accept payments in cryptocurrency anywhere in the world. Usually they tend to create conditions for students of technological, business or economics programmes. One of the leaders in this field is the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. The university accepts all payments in cryptocurrency, with almost two percent of its students taking advantage of the opportunity. Payment for cryptocurrencies is also accepted in the private University of the Americas as well as in several departments in other Universities around the world.

The financial technologies industry has been turning financial markets upside-down for several years. Lithuanian and international financial institutions as well as numerous regulation offices are shifting their focus away from evaluating the significance of the cryptocurrencies phenomena towards integrating these new business models into the traditional finance sector.