University Staking Partners
We’re excited to announce a novel experiment: our University Staking Program. This is a strategic agreement with a select group of Computer Science departments and Cryptography labs at eleven universities around the globe.
The program accounts for 1.95% of the initial NU token supply, giving the participating universities a meaningful stake in the NuCypher network. In exchange, the universities have agreed to stake the tokens and run nodes for at least three years.
For NuCypher, the purpose of this program is several-fold:
- Further diversification of nodes for the NuCypher network;
- Establishment of close ties to leading academics and scientists for future research collaboration;
- Engagement of new, technically sophisticated actors into the blockchain and PoS space.
For universities, the program and subsequent staking operations provide an experiential learning opportunity for students, a potential funding source (e.g for scholarships, research, labs, etc.), and future research opportunities related to the NuCypher network.
We believe this is an exciting opportunity to bring a new set of highly technically competent groups into the blockchain ecosystem who haven't previously engaged with decentralized networks. Hopefully, this will spur similar engagements with other networks and benefit the entire ecosystem.
The participating universities are listed below (in alphabetical order):
- Arizona State University (Professor Dragan Boscovic)
- VeriGu Lab at Columbia University (Professor Ronghui Gu)
- Seoul National University (Professor Jung-Hee Cheon)
- Stevens Institute of Technology (Professor Giuseppe Ateniese)
- University of California at Berkeley (Blockchain @ Berkeley)
- University College London (Dr. Paolo Tasca, Centre for Blockchain Technologies)
- University of Málaga (Professor Isaac Agudo Ruiz, NICS Lab)
- University of Novi Sad (Sasa Pesic, PhD)
- University of Waterloo (Professor Sergey Gorbunov)