Cardano’s lead development firm, IOHK, announced that it established a new research center through a donation of $500,000 to UW (University of Wyoming). The donation was done in the ADA cryptocurrency and is aimed to promote the academic approach of the company towards blockchain engineering and development.
In this new center there will be a new Plutus development facility that will offer an applied laboratory for blockchain developers so they can write code in the smart-contract language of Cardano, together with the resources and tools needed to experiment with ideas and solutions. A design studio is also present for hardware tools that offer anti-counterfeiting and authentication applications for Cardano.
According to Charles Hoskinson, IOHK founder and CEO:
“This is a very applied laboratory, where instead of ding peer theory, we’re actually building real-life things and writing real software that will enter production very quickly.”
Charles Hoskinson did attend the ceremony that marked the opening of the center. The butterfly logo of IOHK is going to be added to the lab.
Thanks to the collaboration with the University of Wyoming, IOHK offers a $500,000 ADA grant in order to fund future development and research in new blockchain applications. This does include supply chain management and traceability tools.
Wyoming will match the grant so the university is going to receive $1 million in order to build this blockchain facility. The university is going to also contribute some extra funds, although it was not mentioned how much.
According to Neal Theobald, UW president:
“The University of Wyoming is proud to be at the forefront of blockchain research and education, and we are grateful for this significant financial contribution from IOHK. This support will help us continue to move forward in a very exciting and promising field of innovation and discovery.”
US-based cryptocurrency firms are attracted to Wyoming because of the crypto-friendly legislation in the state. Companies do have access to extra financial services that are not available somewhere else.
IOHK is now official in Wyoming while Kraken is looking for a brand new operations director that can help the cryptocurrency exchange to be regulated in the state.
UW stands out as the fourth academic institution that hosts a blockchain lab from IOHK. The other centers are at the University of Athens, the University of Edinburgh and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. There are also talks happening with the Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Connecticut.
At the moment, it is not known how many will be employed at the new research center at the university of Wyoming. We also do not know when the research center will be operational.
