David Madison/Getty Images
- The newly launched EduDAO will allocate $11 million a year to university-level students working on technology projects.
- EduDAO is being financed by decentralized asset manager BitDAO in partnership with Mirana Ventures.
- Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Oxford are among the first universities in the EduDAO partnership.
- Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.
BitDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization overseeing more than $2.5 billion in assets, is helping to launch a funding channel for student-led projects focused on blockchain and Web3 innovation.
Along with partner Mirana Ventures, whose investment portfolio includes tokens, they announced Friday the creation of EduDAO, a separate DAO that will partner with eight of the world’s top educational institutions, including Harvard University, the University of Oxford in England, Tsinghua University in China and the University of California, Berkeley.
BitDAO’s treasury will finance EduDAO, which will operate as an independent steering committee and allocate up to $11 million to separate university-centric DAOs.
EduDAO will be jumpstarted with $33 million. The aim is to usher in early-stage venture-capital investments to support the next generation of blockchain and Web3 technologies.
Web3 refers to the next iteration of the internet, which includes the immersive world of the metaverse. A DAO is essentially a group of internet friends who decide to form a group with a common purpose. The rules of that group are then established and enforced with an underlying code that runs on a blockchain.
The most promising technology products and designs are being devised at the university level, but investment capital is “sorely needed,” Jonathan Allen, who co-founded Mirana Ventures and conceived EduDAO, said in a statement.
If a university-based DAO were to succeed, an investment of $25,000 or $50,000 could be maximized by 10 times or even 50 times, he said in a video introduction of the project posted on Twitter.
Such growth “brings a bunch of revenue back to the organization and they can then use that to further educate more students,” he added. The result is a “virtuous cycle” of organizations helping students and students building projects that fund the university DAO, which then pivots back to aiding students.
EduDAO could potentially expand to hundreds of schools beyond the initial eight educational institutions that also include MIT and the University of Pennsylvania.