The U.S government has opted to provide funding to a distributed ledger platform that will be created and refined by researchers at the University of California in San Diego. The grant was awarded to Subhashini Sivagnanam who is a researcher and a software architect at the San Diego Supercomputing Center.
Sivagnanam received a grant of over $818,433 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be able to develop the Open Science Chain (OSC), which is set to be a distributed ledger that provides researchers with the ability to efficiently access and verify data collected via scientific experiments.
The National Science Foundation, created in 1950 by Congress, has a longstanding tradition of promoting the progress of sciences and advancing national health, prosperity, welfare and securing national defense. It supports a host of research initiatives within the U.S by providing them access to federal resources by utilising its annual budget of over 7.5 billion USD.
This isn’t the first foray for the NSF into the blockchain space. Earlier in April, it awarded a grant to the North Carolina State University to fund the research for blockchain data network that would help boost manufacturing. Later on, in July, a Princeton University researcher also received over $400,000 in funding from the NSF to help research ‘duality-based tools for simple vs. optimal mechanism design and applications to cryptocurrency’. The interest of the NSF in this space goes as far back as 2015 when it granted $3 million to the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts (IC3).
According to public records released about the research grant awarded to Sivagnanam, the research is set to create “a web-based cyberinfrastructure platform built using distributed ledger technologies that allow researchers to provide metadata and verification information about their scientific datasets and update this information as the datasets change and evolve over time in an auditable manner.”
The grant is set to begin from 1st of September 2018 and go on until the 31st of August, 2021, as stated in the award letter.
