The United States government has finally awoken to the fact that Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies are the future of digital age. In a recent development, the government run scientific agency — National Science Foundation has announced a grant of $3 million for cryptocurrency research.
Until now, the government and its agencies were more focused on enforcing the law of the land against cryptocurrency based businesses. The three participating universities — University of Maryland, University of California Berkeley and Cornell University will be the recipients of $3 million National Science Foundation grants. These participating universities will be working on developing mew cryptocurrency systems which can address the shortcomings of existing bitcoin and other digital currency networks.
National Science Foundation is funding the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts under its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program. Main purpose of The Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program is to fund research initiatives related to cybersecurity and digital privacy. Last year alone, a total of $75 million was awarded as grants under this program. The agency has received over $7 billion funding for the current Fiscal Year from the Congress. The cryptocurrency research grants will be utilized to support the researchers who are involved in the project.
As a part of the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts, the participating universities will be focusing on developing new systems for cryptocurrency based smart contracts. It will be a continuation of the previous work conducted by the University of Maryland in their smart contracts laboratory.
Princeton University and the University of California – Irvine are two other universities which have received National Science Foundation’s funding for their cryptocurrency based research initiatives this year. Researchers from academia are looking forward to collaborate with cryptocurrency based businesses to get a better understanding of the issues faced by the industry, so that they can work alongside them and find solutions for those issues.