Harvard, MIT, Oxford, others tap $2.5 billion BitDAO to aid blockchain education

Eight world-famous universities, including UC Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and Oxford, have founded a new decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that will focus on addressing the “funding crisis and skills gap” in blockchain research and education.

Dubbed Education DAO (EduDAO), the new organization will have access to a pool of $2.5 billion worth of assets provided by BitDAO—which touts itself as “the world’s largest DAO-directed treasury”—to fund research in the fields of blockchain and the Web3 sector, according to an announcement shared with CryptoSlate today.

“Placing the power of targeted funding and information distribution in the hands of a decentralized collective of students, faculty members, and alumni is a revolutionary step forward for institutions such as Harvard,”

said the Harvard Blockchain Club co-presidents Roman Ugarte and Virat Talwar in the press release.

“More generally, we’re thrilled to be able to pioneer this innovative model and encourage the overall maturation of Web 3 as well as promote blockchain education for the general public.”

The full list of EduDAO’s university partners includes Blockchain at Berkeley, Penn Blockchain, Harvard Blockchain Club, MIT Sloan Blockchain Club, Blockchain at Michigan, [email protected], Oxford Blockchain Society, and Tsinghua University Students Blockchain Association.

“Innovators of tomorrow”

EduDAO will act as an independent committee and will be allocating up to $11 million annually “for project grants, research, and standalone product development with $33 million in the fund to start.”

Additionally, university groups will take part in BitDAO governance votes to help determine the protocol’s future development and provide “recurring contributions” back to the project. The latter may include “building governance or treasury tooling improvements, contributing to other BitDAO funded DAOs, or building standalone products that benefit the BitDAO ecosystem.”

“[At UC Berkeley,] the funds from BitDAO will be used to support activities in the focus areas of DAOs and blockchain for the three RDI pillars—Research, Education and Community/Entrepreneurship,” noted Jocelyn Weber Phipps, UC Berkeley’s deputy director for RDI.” We look forward to working with all the members of the EducationDAO community in the year ahead.”

As CryptoSlate reported, DAOs are becoming increasingly popular as a form of governance lately. Just last week, Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms on the market, announced its plans to develop a decentralized version of its infrastructure on Celo.