US Government Grants $800K to Blockchain Researchers
Researchers at the University of California–San Diego will receive more than $800,000 to develop a distributed ledger to store scientific data.
The U.S. government will help fund a distributed ledger platform being developed by researchers at the University of California-San Diego.
Subhashini Sivagnanam, a researcher and software architect with the Data Enabled Scientific Computing division at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, won $818,433 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Open Science Chain (OSC), a proposed distributed ledger which will help researchers efficiently access and verify data collected through scientific experiments, according to the NSF's website.
NSF, a long-standing scientific organization, serves as a key conduit for research initiatives in the U.S. to tap federal resources. The government organization has funded a number of blockchain projects in previous years, including those focused on different aspects of cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and blockchain technology use cases.
Public records show that the project entails "a web-based cyberinfrastructure platform built using distributed ledger technologies that allows 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."
Simply put, the network would constitute a living – and digital – catalog of their work, growing as more information is developed and added. Researchers will be able to better trust the data they are examining, according to the abstract.
The grant will begin on Sept. 1, 2018, and carry through until Aug. 31, 2021, according to the award letter.
Supercomputer image via Shutterstock
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Farcaster Switches to Wallet-First Strategy to Grow Its Social App
The protocol still consists of casts, follows, reactions, identities and wallets, and third-party clients are free to emphasize whichever components they want.
What to know:
- Farcaster is shifting its focus from social media to its in-app wallet and trading features to drive user engagement.
- Cofounder Dan Romero acknowledged the lack of sustainable growth in their social-first strategy over the past 4.5 years.
- The wallet's trading tools have shown the strongest product-market fit, leading to a strategic pivot towards financial use cases.
