IOG gave $500,000 to Stanford to help pay for research on scaling blockchains.
Input Output Global (IOG), which is building the Cardano blockchain, has given $4.5 million to Stanford University to build a blockchain hub. This is the latest in a series of research hubs at universities around the world.
IOG has opened research labs and worked on projects with the University of Edinburgh, the University of Wyoming, the University of Athens, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in addition to Stanford. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, gave $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) last year to help set up the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics.
Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, is a hotbed of tech innovation. In 2018, two professors who specialize in cryptography, Dan Boneh and David Mazières, opened a Center for Blockchain Research.
Tim Harrison, vice president of Community and Ecosystem at IOG, said that the two groups have been working together for a while. “Before the research hub, we gave them $500,000 to help pay for their research into scaling blockchain. Stanford is a great place for the hub because it is one of the best universities in the world,” Harrison wrote in an email.
When asked if the new IOG-backed blockchain hub would promote the Cardano ecosystem or things like Haskell, the mathematical programming language used to make Cardano smart contracts, Harrison said that the project was “to fund researchers from different fields.”
CEO Charles Hoskinson said that a key part of the IOG’s vision is to set up blockchain research hubs with universities like Stanford. “With the Research Hub, blockchain development can grow even faster, based on what we learn from it,” Hoskinson said in a statement. “It will also give our field a new level of legitimacy that we haven’t always had.”
“Healthy competition is an important part of any growing industry, but especially in its early days, every player needs to do their part to grow the space as a whole,” Harrison said. Researchers at the university will be able to come up with new ideas that will have an effect on the blockchain industry.
