The distributive ledger technologies (DLTs) are the future of human civilization. The blockchain which is a subset of DLTs has tremendous potential and extensive work is being done to relish and utilize it to the fullest. Countries across the globe have witnessed its influence on various sectors of our workspace and have seen its advent into mainstream society.

The USA supports the blockchain developments

The USA is the not only the largest economic hub of the world but also the center for innovation and excellence. The States has been a successful research arena for various new technologies including the blockchain. Recent years have seen many innovations in applications of blockchain coming from the geography of the United States. It has also become a major investment center and tremendous growth has been seen in the blockchain and cryptocurrency market. The U.S. government is not left out when it comes to investment in research about blockchain. The States has set up an example for rest of the world to follow.  

The U.S. government has announced to fund a distributed ledger platform which is developed by researchers at the University of California-San Diego with a whopping amount of $800 thousand. This is not the first time that the U.S. government has shown keen interest on funding the blockchain based projects, last year it had financed many such projects including those focused on different aspects of cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and blockchain technology use cases.

National Science Foundation helping researchers access funds

According to the official website of NSF which is a scientific organization, has awarded Subhashini Sivagnanam, a researcher and software architect with the Data Enabled Scientific Computing division at the San Diego Supercomputing Centre, $818,433 to develop the Open Science Chain (OSC), a proposed distributed ledger which will help researchers efficiently access and verify data collected through scientific experiments. NSF has been serving as a key conduit for research initiatives in the U.S. for a very long time. The website quotes about Subhashini Sivagnanam’s project, “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.” Basically, the blockchain based network would be more reliable for researchers and would constitute a living – and digital – catalog of their work which would grow as more information is added to the work of researchers.

The award letter given to Subhashini Sivagnanam mentions that grant would be accessible from September 1, 201 8 and would carry through till August 31, 2021.

Other countries should take a hint from the blockchain research model of U.S. and other countries like UK and Japan who have been investing profusely in the blockchain research and have also eased out the regulations for trade in cryptocurrencies. The government of these countries is also helping startups to grow and establish themselves by providing them appropriate capital and legal support. Though the blockchain and its applications are still in their latent phase, such support from government encourages growth and innovations in upcoming technologies.