Advancing Educational Innovations and Broadening Participation in STEM with Blockchain Technology

Funding Agency:

  • National Science Foundation
RFP# and Website: 
NSF 22-093
Description: 

The National Science Foundation supports creative, novel, and transformative research on new approaches to advancing formal and informal education, broadening participation, and strengthening workforce development in all areas of STEM, including applications of new and rapidly evolving technology. Blockchain technology is based on the concept of a distributed ledger, where copies of data contained in the ledger are distributed and stored across multiple nodes. In the world of decentralized finance, this technology is used to operate the networks underlying cryptocurrency markets. The design maintains faithful, verifiable, and exact copies of the original data, even if nodes are destroyed or compromised. All stored information is cryptographically protected and chronologically linked in an incorruptible chain. The technology also allows deployment of smart contracts, or programs operating on the blockchain, and creation of novel, cost-saving, time-saving, safe, and secure means of operating on potentially very large datasets. Typical beneficial properties of the blockchain technology include, but are not limited to:

  1. Removal of intermediaries: by allowing the users to interact directly with each other and with data through the use of smart contracts;
  2. Sovereignty and self-regulation: by promoting community ownership, organization, voting, and development of governance models for projects;
  3. Immutability: with all records being permanent and impossible to modify;
  4. Transparency: where all transactions are open and visible, while confidentiality of data such as personal information is maintained;
  5. Promoting collaboration: with various collaborative forms enabled by blockchain tools; and
  6. Trust and anonymity: blockchain design principles and distributed infrastructure provide confidence in its operations and resistance to malicious attacks while allowing user anonymity.
Awards: 

Various

Letter of Intent: 
Not required
Full Proposal Submission Deadline: 

Please contact the program director

Contacts: 

General questions about this DCL should be directed to Tomasz Durakiewicz, tdurakie@nsf.gov, or Wu He, wuhe@nsf.gov.