BTC & ETH Funding Starts For Australian University Crypto PhD Program

The biggest institutions of higher learning in Western Australia has launched a crypto PhD Scholarship Fund that will accept donations entirely in either Bitcoin or Ethereum. This is a great step towards mainstream adoption. The PhD program is mainly focused on targeting students that have a keen interest in pursuing blockchain tech and other computer science subsets.

The Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Excellence at Curtin University, Professor Garry Allison has said that the new initiative is targeting the newly minted rich in the cryptocurrency sector.

“By establishing the Cryptocurrency PhD Scholarship Fund, Curtin will provide the opportunity for entrepreneurs who have realized significant benefits from cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum to give something back to these communities.”

Just over ten years ago, the crypto ecosystem was worth nothing but now, after slowly growing and gaining further adoption from institutional investors, it now boasts of a market cap worth nearly $300 billion.

In order to allow crypto donors to make “real-time, peer-to-peer payments on both Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains”, Curtin University has teamed up with the blockchain firm, Centrality as well as the payments services company, Nelnet international. 

As reported by CCN:

“The most generous of these donors will even get to choose the field of speciality that the Cryptocurrency PhD Scholarship Fund will sponsor.”

So if and when these donations start rolling in, Curtin University won’t be the first institution to see donations from those in the crypto space.

Earlier in the year, the co-founder of Ripple Chris Larsen donated around $25 million XRP to California’s San Francisco University 

CCN continues, saying:

“Last year, Ripple gave $50 million to 17 top universities spread across the world last year with a view of boosting the growth and development of blockchain technology. This was under an effort known as the Blockchain Research Initiative (UBI). Ripple’s donation was, however, in U.S. dollars not in cryptocurrency.”