During the last couple of months, various universities have showcased a growing interest in blockchain and bitcoin technology. In fact, universities like Stanford have introduced bitcoin-specific courses, in order to prep people up for the future of finance.
According to recent reports, it seems like the MIT has just created something known as the Bitcoin Developer Fund, a program meant to support the constant work of top bitcoin core developers such as Gavin Andersen, Wladimir van der Laan and Cory Fields. These three developers joined a program known by the name of MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative a year ago, which is why they’ll benefit from the developer’s fund.
To put things better into perspective, the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) has been announced last year, in April. The program means to bring experts in various domains such as finance, cryptography and programming together, to further research into the possibilities of crypto-finance, and the future of the world’s financial system.
The actual fund has managed to raise over $900,000 with support from a large number of bitcoin and finance-related businesses, including BitFury, Circle, NASDAQ, Bitmain and Chain. Together with this, a couple of venture capitalists and CEOs have also backed the fund, to help MIT raise more money for the program.
According to Brian Forde, the Director of the DCI program, “The goal of the fund is to cover salaries, travel and overall support of Bitcoin protocol development efforts, including events like the Scaling Bitcoin workshop series”.
Based on this, the money raised will not be used to pay for any of the administrative costs associated with operating the DCI program, but rather to finance the code development being carried out by the three developers for bitcoin core. MIT is however open to the idea of setting up another fund, for various other crypto-related projects, as long as there is enough demand and a good number of sponsors, looking to help scale bitcoin adoption, and the creation of other blockchain and bitcoin-based projects.
Forde also announced that MIT has created a bitcoin wallet to which people who wish to donate can do so. For some reason however, once donations are received, the funds are transformed into fiat, thus proving that unfortunately, the world’s isn’t 100% ready to embrace full digital currency adoption yet.
Based on everything that has been outlined so far, what do you personally think about the DCI program, and the $900k fund raised for the tree bitcoin developers? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.