A new partnership has been announced between Arizona State University (ASU) and the Dash cryptocurrency. The Dash Scholars Program will provide $350,000 of funding to support research, development and education into Blockchain technology. The money will fund undergraduate and graduate scholarships and research fellowships, lab projects, and further development of teaching courses.

Within the cryptocurrency community, there has been a tendency to concentrate solely on the development of software, updates and features. However, this development work is only possible because of a vast amount of research.

Dash is not the first cryptocurrency to form a partnership with a university. In 2015, the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) was launched by MIT and was funded by a number of outside donations, raising $2 million by the end of 2016. The DCI was launched following the decline of the Bitcoin Foundation, which had been providing funding for research and development.

The important thing about the ASU-Dash partnership is that the direction of influence is reversed. While MIT is funding the development of Bitcoin technology and could theoretically exercise influence on the project, Dash is funding research at ASU, meaning that power moves the other way, from cryptocurrency to university – which helps to protect the project.