University College Oxford Launches Blockchain Research Centre

Director says the new centre aims to bring Blockchain to the mainstream

University College Oxford ("Univ") has established a new Research Centre for Blockchain research under the leadership of its Fellow Professor Bill Roscoe FREng. Univ, founded in 1249, lays claim to being the oldest College of Oxford University. Its renowned alumni include US President Bill Clinton, Professor Stephen Hawking, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

Professor Roscoe stated: "The new centre focuses on bringing the blockchain to the mainstream. This vision will be achieved by using green mining technology and embracing regulation through appropriate Know Your Client (KYC) guidelines." Professor Roscoe first arrived at Univ in 1975, and became a Fellow in 1983 and a full Professor in 1997. He held a number of significant leadership positions at Oxford University including as the Head of the University's Computer Science Department between 2003 and 2014.

Professor Roscoe's background of over 30 years of research in concurrency, automated verification, applied cryptography and payment protocols places him in a unique position to research blockchain. He is also joined at the research centre by and a group of leading experts in similar areas. The group is working to vastly improve the efficiency of blockchain mining and trust models, to build new models of privacy and escrow in the blockchain, and to create models of fair exchange to support secure blockchain-based exchanges.

The group has also found new approaches to solving the cryptographic challenge that blockchains pose: to establish long-term secure cryptography for a continuously evolving industry. One such example is the threat posed by quantum computers to the blockchain industry.

University College Oxford Blockchain Research Centre will be interdisciplinary in nature, researching economic, business, technological and legal aspects of blockchain. The research will be carried out in collaboration with several others leading institutions around the world.