Aptos Labs Awards $50K Grant for Blockchain in Higher Education

By Jason Nelson

Despite a harsh crypto winter that has brought several industry names to ruin, blockchain technology continues to thrive in education. Aptos Labs, the company behind the blockchain of the same name, announced a $50,000 grant award on Wednesday to Professor Lorenzo Alvisi of Cornell University in New York.

Alvisi, who earned his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1996, teaches computer science and conducts research into distributed computing and game theory.

“We are delighted to support the work of Professor Alvisi’s students as they not only research novel blockchain systems but also develop real-world, scalable use cases and applications to benefit the future of the industry,” Avery Ching, CTO and co-founder of Aptos Labs. said in a statement.

According to the announcement, the grant will fund student research in scaling blockchain performance using a “client-centric architecture,” which goes on to declare that doing so will involve “building the abstraction of a secure, fault-tolerant, decentralized append-only log on top of a Byzantine-tolerant database.”

A Byzantine-tolerant computer system can continue operating even if some nodes fail or act maliciously.

According to Ching, blockchain education remains “a core value” of Aptos’ mission.

Aptos is a layer one blockchain launched in October 2022 by Aptos Labs, the company founded by Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh, who previously worked on Meta’s (then Facebook) Diem’s Novi wallet. Aptos uses parallel execution, which the company claims makes transactions fast while keeping them cheap.

Last summer, Aptos raised $150 million in funding led by FTX and investors, including Parafi, in late July, after raising another $200 million in March through a strategic round that included Andreessen Horowitz, Multicoin Capital, and Haun Ventures.

Blockchain companies have a long history of donating funds to educational institutions. In 2018, Ripple committed $50 million to universities, including Princeton and the University of Texas, through its University Blockchain Research Initiative. In 2020, IOHK, the cryptocurrency company behind Cardano, donated $500,000 worth of Cardano (ADA) to the University of Wyoming to help fund blockchain research.

“This collaboration with Aptos will help our team understand how to allow existing blockchain-based applications to take full advantage of our novel architecture,” Alvisi said in a statement posted on the school’s website. “Aptos’ Block-STM, which is at the forefront of today’s scalable blockchain execution engines, is a beautiful example of bringing to blockchains the concurrency advantages offered by databases.”

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