Not all crypto is bad and that is one message that Klatyn is attempting to illustrate to the world through its charitable donations. This week, Klatyn announced that they would be donating more than $20 million to universities that teach and encourage blockchain engineering. The fund will be made available for universities primarily located in South Korea with the possibility for expansion in the coming months.
A Korean Founding
Klaytn, introduced by messaging app Kakao’s blockchain arm Ground X, went live in 2019 and now has millions of users spanning all across continental Korea and some even abroad. Klaytn currently has a token with over $880 million in market cap, according to CoinGecko, making it the 66th largest cryptocurrency on the crypto markets right now.
This company is no newbie to the crypto sphere or technological space. It has partnered and is backed by tech Goliaths LG Electronics, with crypto exchange Binance and South Korea’s Shinhan Bank acting as advisors and sitting on their board of directors.
With that kind of star power backing you up, surely, a $20 million investment in education is a no-brainer right?
Let’s talk about the who, what, where, when, and most importantly, how.
The Crypto-Korean Plan
The Klaytn Foundation director Sangmin Seo announced the funding and called the Blockchain Research Center (BRC) Program at Korea Blockchain Week with great anticipation both domestically and abroad. Seo said the commitment is one of the largest blockchain research programs in terms of funding grants.
Day-to-day operations will be run by a global team headed by researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Seoul and the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The blockchain is the second to announce an academic funding program. They aren’t alone nor are they the first to pioneer the philanthropic efforts of blockchain protocols. Just earlier this August, the Algorand Foundation named the winners of a grant project offering $50 million to universities including Yale, University of Cape Town, and Monash University in Australia.
The Nitty Gritty Details
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty details of how Klaytn’s new philanthropic arm will function and what types of participants are eligible for the grant. BRC will operate in an open-source manner, where research conducted will be publicly disclosed as research papers or open-source software. This means the chance to publish in academic journals, both reputable and not, will be an option for the participants.
This is great because it gives its researchers the freedom and autonomy to continue pursuing their research regardless of their association with Klatyn. External researchers will also be able to participate in existing research projects or submit their own proposals.
The CEO of Klatyn, Seo said KAIST and NUS were selected from a pool of participating research institutes that submitted a proposal. Seven proposals were received from 62 research institutes in 11 countries.
The KAIST and NUS research group was selected by the Klaytn Governance Council. This echoed a strong sentiment from both the Korean populace and government that Korea should come first when it comes to research-based grants coming from Klatyn.
This sense of national duty to Korea is both understandable and expected from the island-state. But will this mean that others are stiffened by being foreigners? And will this lead to the Korean government playing a very significant hand in everything crypto that occurs on the island?
