Britt Bardman
Staff Writer
The University of Wyoming has received a $500,000 gift in Ada cryptocurrency from Input Output, iohk.io (IOHK) that is aimed to expand and support the development of blockchain technology at UW.
The gift, announced last Friday, is the largest cryptocurrency gift UW has received and is among the largest cryptocurrency gifts to a public university. It will support the UWYO-IOHK Advanced Blockchain Research and Development Laboratory, which will be housed in UW’s Secure Systems Collaborative with UW’s Cybersecurity Education and Research Center (CEDAR).
“The real-world applications of Blockchain are limitless and IOHK’s donation of $500,000 – in ada, the native cryptocurrency of our cardano blockchain platform, to the University of Wyoming’s Blockchain Research and Development Lab- will go some way toward realising that potential and will help to bolster Wyoming’s burgeoning blockchain revolution,” said IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson, through his representative Douglas Keighley.
The state of Wyoming is expected to match the dollar value of grant, increasing UW’s initial funding for the new blockchain facility to $1 million. The University of Wyoming will also contribute funds, but have not specified how much.
In this UW lab, faculty members and graduate students will develop practical hardware and software applications of blockchain technology in the real-world use cases of cryptography, authentication, supply chain management, cryptocurrency and smart contracts.
Professor James Caldwell, Assistant Professor Mike Borowczack and Professor of Practice Philip Schlump, all from the Computer Science department of UW, will be co-directors of the laboratory. Their expertise will be added upon with visiting faculty and master’s, doctorates and postdoctoral students.
Blockchain is a database technology for storing information that is revolutionizing industries such as banking, law, identity and chain of custody. A blockchain is a time-stamped series of unchanging data records managed by a cluster of computers with no central authority. Blocks on the blockchain contain information about transactions like the date, time and dollar amount of a recent purchase and store information about who is participating in transactions with a unique “digital signature.” A single block on the bitcoin blockchain can store up to 1 MB of data.
Founded in 2015 by Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, IOHK is committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the 3 billion people who do not have them. They describe themselves as an engineering company that builds cryptocurrencies and blockchains for academic institutions, government entities and corporations.
“The Wyoming Blockchain Taskforce’s supportive business environment and the excellence of the University of Wyoming’s science research is what led IOHK to choose to invest here. We are incorporated here as a business and are very happy to play a small part in helping embed Wyoming’s position at the global heart of blockchain-based innovation,” said Hoskinson.
IOHK’s donation goes beyond the University of Wyoming. The gift recognizes Wyoming’s potential as one of the leading and most accepting regions in the world for blockchain development.
In January 2019, Wyoming passed two house bills to create a regulatory framework to foster cryptocurrency and blockchain innovation. A number of blockchain companies have shown interest in locating in or relocation to Wyoming as a direct result of the legislation. Recently, Wyoming has developed a series of rules for “blockchain banks,” which addressed cryptocurrency-focused features including forks, airdrops and staking.
“IOHK’s $500,000 donation, in the native Cardano cryptocurrency, ADA, will not just fund research into real-world uses of blockchain technology, but will also develop Wyoming further as a talent hub for software engineers, trained in the most advanced software development methods in the world,” said UW alumni Wall Street Veteran and a former member of the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force, Caitlin Long, to Cointelegraph.
UW is breaking ground as the fourth academic institution to host an IOHK blockchain lab and the first American campus to be fully affiliated with the company. Details to when the lab will be fully operational and staffed have yet to be sorted out.
