The University of Pennsylvania received a $5 million donation in Bitcoin, which it has reportedly already exchanged for fiat. According to the university, an anonymous benefactor gifted UPenn’s Wharton School of Business $5 million in Bitcoin (BTC) — roughly 118.46 BTC at the time of publication — which will be used to support the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. However, UPenn senior vice president of development and alumni relations John Zeller told MarketWatch that the university immediately liquidates all crypto donations, large and small. “We sell it the moment it’s received,” said Zeller, adding that the university still had …

It is a pivotal moment in the development of the new digital economy. Interest in all things crypto keeps growing exponentially, and investment follows closely. There has arguably never been so much money poured into a product class that was so poorly understood, both by the wider public and by most investors. In lieu of actual understanding, stakeholders in the crypto space have to operate on reputation and trust instead. This necessity has given rise to a dangerous new con. Unlike blatant scams like OneCoin or Bitconnect, today’s blockchain opportunists and confidence tricksters often play the faux science card. “Read …

The University of Wyoming is allocating $4 million to running nodes and staking at least three cryptocurrencies. The news was shared to Twitter on April 28 by Caitlin Long, a Wyoming Blockchain and Fintech Select Committee appointee and founder of Avanti Bank & Trust — a local bank servicing the digital asset sector. NEWS NOT REPORTED YET: State of #Wyoming appropriated $4m for nodes/staking in at least 3 cryptocurrencies, run by Univ of Wyoming. This kickstarts program where gains from this pool, if matched by private donations, go to fund UWyo! @rothfuss https://t.co/LDul3iGtS4 pic.twitter.com/KxFVm5YhLp — Caitlin Long (@CaitlinLong_) April 28, …

A public university in the Romanian city of Sibiu in Transylvania has said it will allow students to pay for their admission fees in crypto. According to an announcement from Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu on Wednesday, the institution plans to implement crypto payment methods for its more than 11,000 students starting in July. Students will reportedly be able to pay for admission fees — tuition is roughly $1,000 per year for undergraduates — using Elrond (EGLD), which the university will then convert to Romanian leu. “Our university has been and will continue to be a supporter of the community …

Blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies has joined forces with the University of California, Berkeley to strengthen the institution’s blockchain curriculum and promote adoption among students and the community. For the 2020–21 academic year, Parity Technologies will work with UC Berkeley’s faculty and students in curriculum preparation, project ideas and other initiatives to strengthen the blockchain learning experience. Parity will also advise students and entrepreneurs looking to launch their next blockchain startup. The partnership centers around UC Berkeley’s Blockchain Xcelerator program, which launched in January 2019 to support new startups and create a globally competitive blockchain curriculum. Since its inception, Xcelerator …

Competition authorities are hitting the books when it comes to emerging technologies like blockchain and AI. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced that it would be participating in a new initiative at Stanford University to onboard more advanced technological tools into its fight against monopolies. The DoJ is merely the most vocal addition to Stanford’s Computational Antitrust project. It joins the competition watchdogs of 46 other countries and the U.S.’s Federal Trade Commission. The announcement is part of a broad surge in interest in cutting-edge tech and antitrust law, the culmination of a lot of motion at both academia …

Researchers from the University of Bern have released a report claiming Ripple’s consensus protocol “ensures neither safety nor liveness.” In a blog posted yesterday from the university’s Cryptology and Data Security Research Group, researchers Christian Cachin, Amores-Sesar, and Jovana Mićić released an analysis alleging the payment firm’s consensus protocol could allow users to potentially “double-spend a token” and halt the processing of transactions. The trio set up examples of the Ripple protocol using different numbers and types of nodes to illustrate possible violations of safety and liveness (a term for the network continuing to process transactions and makes progress). According …

toMore than one dozen teams representing the mathematics and computer science departments of Oxford and Cambridge universities are competing to build crypto trading algorithms on major exchanges Coinbase Pro and FTX. According to a Nov. 25 announcement, the 15 teams will be assessed on their trading strategies, the technical design of their algorithms, and their overall return on investment. The competition launched on Nov. 16 and will run until Dec. 16. The strategies employed include arbitrage, predictions based on machine learning and neural networks, and trend investing based on time-sequence forecasting. APEX:E3 is the contest’s principal sponsor, with the institutional …

Open The New York Times' rolling survey of coronavirus cases on United States college campuses, and the picture looks bleak: As of Nov. 5, over 252,000 cases had been confirmed across 1,600 colleges nationwide. The spread of infection, combined with an at best incompetent and at worst cynical and exploitative policy toward college students and staff has resulted in university communities facing stringent quarantines in unsafe accommodations or being summarily sent home. All the while, students are expected to foot the bill for the full cost of their tuition fees. With over 2,500 reported cases as of Nov. 5, Arizona …

Pennsylvania State University, a U.S. university touting more than 100,000 students, has agreed to operate as a signing node for GoChain's proof-of-reputation, or PoR, blockchain. Constructed as a fork of the Ethereum blockchain's code, GoChain is secured by selected entities that run their own nodes, Marie Gonzalez, GoChain's senior vice president of marketing, told Cointelegraph. GoChain's blockchain uses a consensus mechanism called PoR, which calls on a set number of approved signing nodes to help run the network. The blockchain aims to eventually function with 50 of these nodes. "We set the bar high so it'll take time to get …

Details of a week-long negotiation between the University of California and a NetWalker ransomware gang have been revealed by Bloomberg. The University’s School of Medicine was working on a vaccine for Covid-19 in June this year when seven of its servers were locked down by the hackers. Against the advice from FBI, the university took matters into its own hands and conducted private negotiations. The university negotiator used flattery, appealed to the hackers sense of sympathy and ethics, and managed to reduce the ransom amount from as much as $6M, down to just over $1 million in Bitcoin (BTC) and …

Blockchain and data science societies from some of the world’s most prestigious universities have joined blockchain infrastructure providers like Bison Trails as founder members of the Oasis University Program. The program, announced Aug. 13, aims to highlight and popularize the Oasis Network within this student society ecosystem. The Oasis Network is a proof-of-stake blockchain designed to enable the tokenization of data, allowing users to maintain control of what data is shared and to whom. With access to technical support, tutorials and events focused on responsible data, university groups will build apps, run validators and engage in governance on the Oasis …