The Tezos Foundation has announced in an August 9th press release that it will be issuing grants to universities and research institutions for the purpose of smart contract and DLT related development, as well as Tezos ecosystem education. The Tezos Foundation is providing grants to four research facilities – the University of Illinois, Cornwell University, the University of Beira Interior, and France-IOI.
The research projects
Cornell University is focusing on sharding, a solution that relates to scalability in blockchain architectures. The research is set to last two years and will be led by Emin Gun Sirer.
The University of Beira Interior in Portugal has received a grant for two projects. The first involves event logging for robots in factories. The second involves the analysis of smart contracts in a variety of programming languages. It will also focus on formal verification techniques and support for machine-checked smart contracts.
The University of Illinois will undertake research into new methods of decentralization. With the two year grant, the university will create accessible online developer documentation for the Tezos ecosystem. The name of the institution within the university that is performing the task is Decentralized et Consulting LLC (“decet“).
France-IOI, in partnership with a number of other research facilities, is developing tools and methods so that students can learn about coding, algorithms, and the Tezos architecture. Both decet and France-IOI are supporting the training of future Tezos developers.
Who is Tezos?
Tezos is famous in the world of cryptocurrency, though not for the right reasons. The ICO raised a colossal amount of money in 2017 – USD 232 Million – only to swiftly disintegrate due to infighting. Several lawsuits ensued as Johann Gevers, the appointed President of the Tezos foundation, allegedly went rogue and started stealing user funds. Gevers has since stepped down.
Because all funds were locked into the Tezos Foundation, the whole project ground to a halt, and it was a long time before investors saw any ‘Tezzies’. Investors were later asked to conform to retroactive KYC requirements in order to get their tokens, a year after they had invested in the project, leading to outrage.
Tezos is a smart contract platform with an on-chain governance model. It is ironic that a project that emphasizes a transparent governance model above all else would immediately suffer from governance issues.
But what is most surprising about the project is that Tezos actually appears to be bouncing back, despite suffering one of the biggest and most publicly highlighted scandals in cryptocurrency history. After class action lawsuits and a PR nightmare, 12 months later the Tezos betanet went live, in July 2018.
The mainnet is expected to go live in the coming months. Additionally, PWC is set to perform an external audit of the company, which may add more legitimacy.
Digital Nomad with an interest in Zen and Blockchain technology.
Law graduate with 3 years experience as a consultant in the capital markets industry and 4 years experience freelancing on UpWork as a Creative Writer.
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