Ex MakerDAO partner pledges $4.2m for DeFi research 🚨 This article is 5 years old...
Ex MakerDAO partner pledges $4.2m for DeFi research
2 min read
Updated: Feb. 20, 2022 at 2:37 pm UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
Nikolai Mushegian, the former technical partner at blockchain project MakerDAO, donated 3,200 MKR to his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. The Pittsburgh-based university is also set to receive another 6,800 MKR over the next 1 to 3 years to research dapps and protocols for Web3, Mushegian said.
Carnegie Mellon University receives 3,200 MKR for Web3 and DeFi research
Many believe that the future of blockchain is to revolutionize the finance industry, which is why most of blockchain investments are focused on boosting DeFi development. Nikolai Mushegian, a former technical partner at the MakerDAO blockchain project, seems to share this opinion.
In a blog post on his website, Mushegian announced that he donated 3,200 of his MKR tokens to his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Mushegian said he donated the money to the Pittsburgh-based university to enable the university to work on DeFi-specific protocols. He said in the blog post:
“The purpose of this donation is to establish a research program for decentralized applications/protocols and game-theoretic mechanisms.”
While the detailed agenda and a concrete plan of action most likely won’t be available until the end of January, Mushegian said that the main use for the funds will be to sponsor master and Ph.D. students working on “a few key areas of research,” such as algorithm design and game theory.
Mushegian plans on giving away almost $3 million more to CMU
Mushegian said that the main thing that led him to set up the fund was the increasing “rent-seeking behavior” from some of the industry’s biggest players.
He explained in the blog post, saying working on scaling and game theory are the key areas that can be improved:
“We risk this industry becoming monopolized by people who are better at filing patents than writing working code.”
He added that as universities are not easily bothered by corporations, it’s the perfect place for doing research that will benefit the public. It also doesn’t hurt that academia attracts some of the best contributors and researchers in the blockchain industry, he seemed to imply in the post.
The 3,200 MKR Mushegian paid out on Dec. 31, 2019, was just the first out many donations Carnegie Mellon University is set to receive. According to his website, Mushegian said that he has “informally committed” to donate another 6,800 MKR to the university. The $2.8 million donation won’t be a one-time payout like the Dec. 31 one, but will be spread out over the next one to three years, Mushegian said.
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Maker is a decentralized autonomous organization on the Ethereum blockchain seeking to minimize the price volatility of its own stable token — the Dai — against the IMF’s international currency basket SDR.