The Imperial College London has teamed up with Blockchain, a software platform for digital assets, to launch the Digital Asset Research Lab, according to a recent Blockchain blog post.
The new lab, which has been funded as part of a three-year partnership with the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering at Imperial, is designed to operate at the leading international center for ongoing research and application related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Peter Smith, Blockchain CEO, will be joining the lab’s steering committee where he will be responsible for focusing on identifying and agreeing on the priority areas for research and prototyping. Meeting twice a year, the committee will review, consider, and approve potential projects, in addition to overseeing the performance of current projects. According to Blockchain, the first projects are likely to focus on smart contracts and state channels.
The bitcoin company said:
With this partnership, we’re stoked to help encourage and usher in the next wave of blockchain developers.
This, however, is not the first time that Imperial College London has dabbled with the technology.
In 2014, the college launched a competition that was designed to encourage innovation in the field of blockchain technology. At the time of the competition it was seeking entrants from a range of different departments, including business, computing, engineering, and mathematics, with prizes ranging from £500 to £3,000 for the best project.
In February of last year, the Imperial College Business School in London teamed up with Citigroup to explore digital currencies following similar partnerships between other schools and MasterCard and Santander.
With interest running high in digital currencies among many schools including those of MIT Sloan, Harvard, and Stanford, Imperial College London realize the possibilities that the technology can present. To further reinstate the currencies use, the Imperial Data Science Institute in London exhibited 64 monitors with lines moving in geometric shapes representing real-time bitcoin transactions, in May 2016.
This process enables industry and academia to visualize data in ways that establish new insights. Furthermore, it also promotes the communication of complex data in a multi-dimensional environment.
As more attention shifts to the potential benefits of what the technology can provide various industries, it pays for them to be at the forefront of the technology instead of lagging behind others. By teaming up with Blockchain, the Imperial College London is attempting to establish itself as the vanguard of this innovative technology with its own research.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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