Francesca Maglione
A little less than a year ago, Princeton University launched a center devoted to blockchain technology, backed by a $20 million donation – and a lot of hype – from former students and crypto advocates like billionaire Mike Novogratz.
That was, of course, before FTX imploded and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was charged with fraud. The scandal felled other crypto companies and triggered a plunge in the price of Bitcoin and other digital tokens.
But Princeton is unbowed.
The university said its Center for the Decentralization of Power Through Blockchain Technology – or DeCenter, for short — was founded to explore the potential benefits and pitfalls of blockchain.
It’s essential for universities to play a major role in the technology development, use cases and societal and ethical implications of blockchain and to harness its powers for good, said Andrea Goldsmith, Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied science one of the co-directors of DeCenter.
“That was my motivation to start this center,” she said in an interview, “and everything that’s happened since we launched it has only validated that this is the case.”
That doesn’t mean everyone agrees.
DeCenter is “one of the more controversial things that Princeton has done,” Goldsmith said. Some faculty members have questioned why the university is participating in the sector.
“What happened this last year in the crypto world was absolutely shocking, and people really need to sort out what the future is likely to bring,” said Richard Lyons, chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer for the University of California at Berkeley. “Universities need to help us sort that out.”
Neutral Voice
Lyons said he believes academia can serve as a neutral voice in the debate over blockchain and what kinds of policies the industry should embrace — and DeCenter aims to be just that.
It will on research within three main areas: the development of blockchain technology, its potential applications and impact on society. The center also aims to partner with outside entities, including blockchain startups.
In addition to Novogratz, the chief executive officer of Galaxy Digital, the center’s founding donors include Fortress Investment Group co-CEO Peter Briger, ethereum blockchain network co-founder Joseph Lubin and Pantera Capital CEO Daniel Morehead. Novogratz and Lubin were roommates at Princeton in the 1980s and graduated around the same time as Jaswinder Pal Singh, a computer science professor who co-leads the center with Goldsmith.
At the end of November – just weeks after FTX filed for bankruptcy – DeCenter held a kickoff with about 60 guests, including Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Rostin Behnam and Dan Berkovitz, then general counsel for the Securities Exchange Commission.
The goal was to come up with “the important questions Princeton should pursue” in the blockchain industry, Singh said.
FTX’s collapse is an example of bad actors taking advantage of new technologies, according to DeCenter’s leaders.
“It just was able to happen perhaps on a much larger scale than would’ve been possible if it wasn’t blockchain and a very hyped crypto industry,” Goldsmith said.
If anything, Singh said, the events of the past year have made DeCenter’s mission even more important.
“Having a university in the middle of that helps not only convene people and have deep discussions, but also to do the research to really flesh out what is hype, what is not hype, what’s possible, what’s not possible,” Goldsmith said.
Novogratz’s vision for DeCenter hasn’t changed.
“Princeton is a world-class institution,” he said in an email. “We wanted to work with someone who wasn’t a market participant or pressured by short-term views to take an academic look at all aspects of what a decentralized world will look like.”
