The Institute For the Future (IFF) at the University of Nicosia announces candidacy to become an Order Provider on the Obyte Public Network

The University of Nicosia (UNIC) is consistently ranked among leading universities in the Emerging Europe and Central Asia (EECA) region (QS World University Ranking). UNIC is the largest university in Cyprus and among the largest English language universities in southern Europe, with over 12,000 students, from over 70 countries across the globe, coming together in an innovative and transformative learning space. UNIC also secured an Institutional Rating of 4 QS Stars from the QS Intelligence Unit for overall excellence in education, while it was the first university in the EU to be awarded a 5-Star rating for Online/Distance Learning.

UNIC is internationally recognised by independent observers for its dynamic and pioneering university Blockchain and Cryptocurrency initiative in the fields of teaching, research and development. Notably, UNIC is by most measures, the top university globally in the digital currency and blockchain fields. The University has long considered blockchain technology to be a fundamental technological breakthrough with significant financial and societal implications and selected it as one of its three interdisciplinary priorities across all schools and departments. The objective is to help students, businesses and governments develop a holistic view of the technical, business, legal and societal implications of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies and use them to help build a better future.

UNIC has constantly broken new ground in academia, being the first university in the world to:

• Teach a university-level course on blockchain and cryptocurrency (since January 2014) in the form of an online free MOOC (Introduction to Digital Currencies).
• Launch an accredited MSc academic degree program taught online in English (MSc in Digital Currency, March 2014).
• Accept Bitcoin for tuition for any degree program at the university (since October 2013).
• Issue academic certificates onto the Bitcoin blockchain (since September 2014)

This leading role in academia has been recognized by blockchain industry publications by evaluating UNIC at the top among universities involved in the field (CoinDesk, #1, 2016; Merkle #1, 2017). Today, UNIC, through its School of Business, School of Sciences and its Institute For the Future (IFF) employs the largest team in the academic world working on cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, with over 35 faculty, industry experts, administrative staff and guest lecturers.

UNIC provides corporate and professional training to a variety of financial and business organizations and is the key academic partner of the Association of Financial Professionals on blockchains. UNIC is also actively involved in the academic blockchain ecosystem via its Blockchain Research Center with several collaborations worldwide. Furthermore, it is active in the broader blockchain ecosystem by organizing International Conferences, such as DECENTRALIZED, leading or participating in panels at major conferences, such as Consensus and playing a major role in advancing the field.

The Institute For the Future

The Institute For the Future is an interdisciplinary research Centre at UNIC, aimed at advancing emerging technologies and contributing to their effective application in industry, government and education, as well as, evaluating their impact on employment, wealth inequality and our lives and societies in general.

The general mission at IFFs to educate leaders, develop knowledge and build communities to help society prepare for a future shaped by transformative technologies.

Current focus of the Institute is set to the following areas:

• Blockchain and Digital Currencies; where we have been the world’s first institution to offer academic programs in this field since 2014.
• Forecasting algorithms; through the Makridakis Open Forecasting Centre (MOFC), hosted within IFF.

IFF embraces Obyte’s network Decentralization

At IFF we conduct academic research in distributed ledgers and digital currency to further advance the field. As part of our community building activities in the blockchain space, we embrace the development of innovative projects that are based on or inspired from the core blockchain technology as initially proposed by the Bitcoin protocol. As part of our exploration in the space we are interested in understanding the behaviour of alternative data structures for decentralized ledger systems/protocols. The idea of Obyte (previously known as Byteball) with the proposal of a decentralized Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) data structure, tamper proof storage of arbitrary data has intrigued the interest of the research team.

Simply put, Obyte proposes the use of a DAG to connect transactions to one or more previous transactions forming a DAG, and thus increasing the degree of disintermediation. Compared to a traditional blockchain-based system where miners or block producers act as gatekeepers, deciding which transactions should be included in the next block, Obyte uses a DAG as the underlying data structure.

To further understand the specificities of the project, to push further research, and to support the network by improving its decentralization degree, IFF announces candidacy to become an Obyte Order Provider (Witness) node.

Why support IFF?

IFF aims to position itself as an interface between academic research and the blockchain ecosystem. By voting for IFF in becoming a default Order Provider node you extend this support to:

• a University that has been engaged with the ecosystem and the community since 2013;
• an institution that has been in the forefront of research on distributed ledgers, spanning from (but not limited to) underlying data structures, incentivization models, and on consensus algorithms;
• an institution that is offering the World’s First Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on blockchain and cryptocurrency for free, supporting the community and bridging the educational gap. This course is taught by world leading experts Andreas Antonopoulos and Antonis Polemitis, and attended by over 35,000 students since 2014;
• an institution that was recognised as the “Biggest Contributor to the Rise of Blockchain in 2018” held in RAI, Amsterdam, on 26–27 June 2018;
• an institution that has been active in the development and exploration of real-world uses of the technology, such as, the issuance of academic certificates onto the Bitcoin blockchain (since September 2014);
• an institution that is agnostic to any particular distributed ledger framework and invites collaborations with any entity that aims to push further the development of the field. One of the goals of IFF is to create a decentralized alliance for research by inviting Universities, Institutions, and/or individuals researchers (PhD Candidates, Post-docs) to undertake research challenges that relate to specific projects from the ecosystem.

What does it mean for Obyte?

IFF will support Obyte’s community in the following ways:

• improve the robustness of the Obyte’s network by providing a stable, academically honest and secure environment for a Witness node;
• increase decentralization of the network with a geographically distributed Witness node, located within IFF’s premises;
• provide an independent evaluation of Obyte’s work, research and open-source software;
• promote transparency of the network by sharing findings with the community;

Choose IFF as your next default Order Provider node and support decentralization of the Obyte Network!

If you are aligned with our ideology and would like to support our independent efforts, head over to the Polls on Obyte.io and vote for the Institute For the Future at the University of Nicosia to become the next default Witness node for Obyte.

You can vote by using your Obyte wallet app, which also provides full transparency of the results.

If you require more information or have questions about how the IFF plans to collaborate with Obyte, please contact: Dr Klitos Christodoulou at christodoulou.kl@unic.ac.cy or in the Obyte Discord at: _kl1t0s#8161

IFF Research Team @ UNIC

• Klitos Christodoulou ( @klitoschr ) — Research Manager and Faculty Member, University of Nicosia — Institute For the Future (UNIC-IFF)
• Elias Iosif ( @iosife ) — Faculty Member, University of Nicosia — Institute For the Future (UNIC-IFF)
• Antonios Inglezakis ( @antIggl ) — Researcher / Senior Software Engineer and Systems Administrator, University of Nicosia — Institute For the Future (UNIC-IFF)