Researchers from seven colleges across the United States are working together to create Unit-e.
The proposed cryptocurrency will purportedly have the capacity to rival Visa and Mastercard in terms of transactions processed per second.
The participating professors include prominent researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), UC-Berkeley, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California, and the University of Washington.
The researchers are working together under the banner of Distributed Technology Research (DTR), a nonprofit foundation backed by Pantera Capital for the purpose of developing next-generation digital currencies to achieve wide adoption.
“In the 10 years since Bitcoin first emerged, blockchains have developed from a novel idea to a field of academic research,” said Giulia Fanti, a lead researcher for DTR and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “Our approach is to first understand fundamental limits on blockchain performance, then to develop solutions that operate as close to these limits as possible, with results that are provable within a rigorous theoretical framework.”
Joey Krug, who is joining the DTR Foundation Council, and is co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital, a backer of Unit-e, added, “A lack of scalability is holding back cryptocurrency adoption, and DTR’s groundbreaking research is addressing this. The Unit-e developers are turning this research into real scalable performance which will benefit a huge swath of decentralized financial applications.”
Unit-e should launch in the second half of 2019.