Crypto Meets University: A $350000 Partnership With ASU
By: Alex Machiavelli
Tags: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Arizona, Arizona State University, Asus

On Wednesday, the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency Dash announced a partnership with Arizona State University valued at $350,000 to “accelerate research, development and education in ways that advance blockchain transaction speed, efficiency and security and expand its uses.”

The breakdown:

$100,000 provided for The Dash Scholars Program, which will serve as undergraduate and graduate research-based scholarships.

$100,000 to ASU’s Blockchain Research Lab (BRL)

$50,000 to ASU’s Luminosity Lab

$100,000 for an online graduate blockchain course that will launch in the Fall of this year

ASU’s blockchain aficionado chimed in about the deal:

“ASU welcomes this initiative and is ready to play its role in creating a potent blockchain research and innovation environment for young talents to develop practical blockchain applications,” said Dragan Boscovic, a research professor in computer science at Arizona State University and the director of the university’s Blockchain Research Lab.

Universities have already been catching on to the rise of decentralized, peer-to-peer systems that have the potential to fundamentally change how we treat transactions and records. Blockchain technology has become a topic of interest at the major research university, MIT. In fact, it hasn’t been but a year since teams at MIT’s blockchain research laboratory launched a study to examine how much consumers actually care about privacy in relation to cryptocurrency. As an interesting field experiment, the team gave small amounts of Bitcoin to every undergraduate at MIT.

The entirety of the study can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2916489

So, What is Dash?

Dash is a relatively new, self-governing cryptocurrency that is built on the peer-to-peer foundations of Bitcoin that were introduced ten years ago. The features of Dash are comparable to those of Bitcoin, but Dash operates on a slightly modified model. The ideas of self-governance and self-funding are intrinsic to the model that Dash is selling to users. This model of self-governance is protected from Sybil-based attacks which involve malicious interactions with the blockchain that would result in the cloning of unique identifiers and private keys. Sybil attacks would effectively destroy the blockchain, but Dash bases self-governance and self-funding around a model that would prevent these attacks from occurring.

The Treasury System

Dash incentivizes individuals and businesses to perform work (mining) for Dash in return for payouts of the cryptocurrency just as many other cryptocurrencies do, but Dash incorporates a “treasury” system in this process. The treasury system functions as a ten percent deduction from block rewards that are given out to miners. With the ten percent deduction from every block reward comes funding that Dash can put toward hiring developers, funding events, establishing integrations with exchanges, and many other improvements.

Self-Governance With “Masternodes”

The Dash network is divided into a two-tier system. The first tier consists of the aforementioned miners, and the second tier is reserved for those with more than 1000 DASH. Those in the second tier are referred to as the “masternodes” who perform the higher-level tasks associated with the unique user-features of Dash (PrivateSend, InstantSend). The masternodes are also responsible for the governance of Dash. Each masternode receives a single vote to cast on community-sourced proposals that ask for a certain amount of funding.

The mathematical expression for funding eligibility:

(YES VOTES — NO VOTES) > (TOTAL NUMBER OF MASTERNODES * 0.1)

Funding is provided by revenue raised through the “treasury” system, and due to the fact that Dash has surged in price within the last year, the system is essentially self-sustainable. As the price of Dash increases, the total value of the treasury system increases… voila.

By virtue of using this system for self-governance Dash is known as the “first decentralized autonomous organization.”

Self-funding with ASU

It is incredible to note that, in an interview with Cointelegraph, Boscovic implied that Dash paid for its partnership with ASU using its unique treasury system.

“After partnering with Dash this summer and evaluating the possibilities of expanded collaboration, scholarships, Blockchain specialization courses and an accelerated research and innovation effort were identified as ways to move blockchain applications forward. This speaks volumes about Dash network governance and their capability to self-fund strategic initiatives such as this one.”

A crypto-based, self-funded partnership with a university is, for starters, an unprecedented event. One can only ask, how much can Dash and other crypto entities accomplish exclusively through the decentralization of combined efforts and funding?

For more information on Dash, visit the website: https://www.dash.org/