Universities have been helping with blockchain-related research for quite some time and, now, some world-class universities have added the technology to their curriculum.
Uniswap Community Reacts Against The New Proposal, Here is Why
The Uniswap community is debating against a new proposal that favors Flipside Crypto to the tune of $25 million in funding. The funding is for two years, but the arguments against it are numerous.
Many DeFi protocols such as Uniswap provide governance tokens for people to participate in core decisions on their network.
The recent proposal also passed through the votes of the community. Although, before the vote for the proposal could be concluded, Dune Analytics raised the alarm against it.
The Flipside Proposal
The proposal states that holders of UNI will get funds from the project’s treasury to give it $15 million in grants. If the whole program succeeds, an additional $10 million will also go to Flipside next year.
Accordingly, Flipside will channel half of the grant to bounties for new Uniswap users who want to learn everything about analytics and DeFi as a whole.
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The bounties aim at attracting new users and holding them. Flipside anticipates that such a program would raise 900 new members who won’t cash out the bounties but remain in the network.
This is not the first of such programs that Flipside is funding. It is funding others such as yearn, Aave, Uniswap. Another thing is that this proposal would enable people to fund the service. Also, some other analytics providers who will be eligible include The Graph and Dune.
Flipside To Use Uniswap Governance For Educational Services
According to the proposal, Flipside will use half of the grant to run the program. They will pay up to seven staff members full salaries and seven other half salaries from the grant. Then the yield from the program will go into its funding.
Also, Flipside aims to use Uniswap’s governance process to become an official provider of continuing education services. It also expects payments for the services. Also, the seven members of the committee will generate 30% of the funds they receive.
The daily chart shows Uniswap is falling by 2% as the community criticizes the new proposal | Source: UNIUSD on TradingView.com
Another three-member committee will vote for the continuation of the program to another year. All the committees are from Flipside, giving it total power. With such a structure, a lot of people have raised concerns about the proposal.
Before this controversy, one has occurred in July and caused a lot of commotion in the community. The “DeFi Education Fund” proposal and its controversy led another group to launch a new initiative called “Builder-First Legal Activism DAO” by LeXpunK.
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Many people voted against this proposal after Dune Analytics raised the alarm. Many people agreed that the proposal wasn’t okay, including Compound CEO John Palmer of PartyDAO and Dharma & Argent wallet teams.
However, it seems that it won’t be so easy to cancel the proposal. The people supporting it more are the university blockchain organization since it is about continuing education.
In addition, many of the top organizations in Standford, UC Berkeley, Michigan, and Penn have thrown in their support. So, there’s going to be a huge difficulty canceling.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from TradingView.com
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UC Berkeley To Auction Nobel Prize-Winning Inventions As NFTs
NFTs have been a pillar around a variety of upcoming projects and firms. From music, to fashion, to sports – and beyond – NFTs have been a hot topic. Now, the University of California Berkeley is looking to fund research by way of two NFTs at the heart of “biomedical breakthroughs”.
Magnificent Minting
In an announcement on the UC Berkeley website today, the university shared that two Nobel-Prize winning inventions will be up for bidding. The NFTs will consist of internal forms and correspondence centered around research that led to two groundbreaking biomedical advances.
One of the two NFTs, titled ‘The Fourth Pillar’, has been minted on Foundation and will be listed in a 24-hour auction as early as Wednesday, June 2nd. The NFT represents an invention around cancer immunotherapy developed by UC Berkeley’s Jim Allison. Allison’s discovery shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The name is driven from immunotherapy becoming the ‘fourth pillar’ of cancer therapy, alongside surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
The second NFT, yet to be minted, will recognize UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna for her 2020 Nobel in Chemistry, centered around CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The informational release has noted that the university will continue to hold the relevant patents surrounding the research.
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Foundation.app is an Ethereum-powered NFT marketplace. | Source: ETH-USD on TradingView.com
Blockchain At Berkeley
The proceeds from the Foundation auction will go towards funding innovation research and education, with a portion going specifically to UC Berkeley’s blockchain innovation hub and student group, ‘Blockchain at Berkeley’. The university has also engaged in blockchain through other means, such as the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator, a blockchain-focused curriculum and partnership with industry executives.
The university’s chief innovation & entrepreneurship officer Rich Lyons said that the release “represents something magnificent”. Lyons added that “there are people who recognize and care about symbols of great science, and even if they never intend to resell the NFT, they want to own it and they want resources to go back to Berkeley, where the basic research behind these Nobel Prizes came from, to support further research”.
The university will also take a portion of the proceeds and allocate them towards carbon offsets to eliminate the energy costs of minting the NFT.
It’s uncharted territory for the university here, as no precedent has been set on an NFT like this. However, to Lyons and the Berkeley team, there seems to be a bit of allure in that sense; “people give us donations all the time because they care about the institution and the science, so here is a way for somebody to invest in the institution in a slightly different way”, Lyons said.
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Featured image from Pixabay, Charts from TradingView.com
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