As Cornell Tech officially moves into its new location on Roosevelt Island, software giant Microsoft announced that it will be partnering with the Cornell Tech-based Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, otherwise known as IC3.
IC3 involves faculty members from Cornell, Cornell Tech, and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, as well as faculty from UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
According to its website, IC3 “uniquely meets the blockchain community’s urgent need for world-class expertise in computer science that spans cryptography, distributed systems, programming languages, game theory, and system security techniques.”
A blockchain is a digital collection where transactions made via cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, are publicly recorded.
IC3 collaborates with experts from areas such as finance, banking and entrepreneurship to carry out blockchain research and develop faster and more secure developments.
“IC3 was founded to advance blockchain science, technology and applications,” Co-Director of IC3 Prof. Ari Juels, told NewsWise. “We’re delighted to work more closely with Microsoft’s blockchain experts, who share our vision of blockchain-based solutions for next generation financial services.”
Microsoft has already done extensive work with blockchain technologies, working to “create enterprise tooling around existing open source blockchain solutions, making them more accessible to enterprise development.”
The news of the IC3 and Microsoft partnership came shortly after Microsoft announced its new blockchain endeavour, the Coco platform. According to Microsoft’s website, the platform is a “new blockchain framework designed to make it easier to build enterprise networks.”
“As we continue our journey in blockchain, we have watched and read the work of the IC3 team and are impressed with their thinking and the perspective they bring to the community,” said Yorke Rhodes III, global blockchain business strategist at Microsoft. “We are very aligned with the approaches IC3 blockchain experts are taking to address scale, simplification and other topics of interest for enterprise adoption.”
“The synergies in their research fit well with our visions for enterprise scale blockchain solutions,” Rhodes added. “We are excited to work more closely with IC3 through this membership.”