SAN FRANCISCO, USA and NICOSIA, CYPRUS, December 2021 — Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced that it has entered into an agreement with the University of Nicosia (UNIC), aiming to provide educational support in bridging the gap between technical education and hands-on experience through the recently launched Stellar Next-Gen, an initiative established with the objective to foster the growth and development of blockchain and FinTech education amongst tomorrow’s business leaders and developers.

As part of the agreement, both parties will collaborate on a technical Stellar certificate course, operated under the Distributed Ledgers Research Centre (DLRC) at UNIC’s Institute For the Future (IFF). The technical course is aligned with IFF’s philosophy that education drives mass adoption of an emerging technology.

DLRC deploys a Stellar Validator Node contributing resources to the network in support of Stellar’s vision: “To unlock the world’s economic potential by making money more fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered”.

“The strategic alliance with the University of Nicosia allows us to further technical education and support future developers interested in building on Stellar”, said Justin Rice, VP of Ecosystem at the Stellar Development Foundation. “The certificate program gives students valuable expertise, and sets them up to lead innovation in the Stellar ecosystem”.

UNIC previously made headlines when it became the first university in the world to accept cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) for tuition payment. Indeed, UNIC is a world leader in crypto and blockchain education and research, having been the first university in the world to offer a master’s degree in blockchain and digital currencies, as well as the world’s first massive open online course (MOOC) focused on blockchain, which to date has seen almost 50,000 students enroll from 110 countries. UNIC was also the first University to offer a MOOC on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) in 2021. Most recently, the University launched the UNIC Open Metaverse Initiative, focused on the academic, research and policy issues relating to the metaverse, with a particular emphasis on open public systems and standards. This ties in with UNIC’s launch earlier this year of a robust and defensible methodology for calculating Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market capitalizations on an ecosystem basis with the proposal of NFTValuations.

“We have proudly been at the forefront of blockchain research and education, actively bringing the technology to more people through our offering an output”, underlined Dr. Klitos Christodoulou, Research Manager at IFF. “The blockchain space is facing numerous and varied challenges. As such, the heterogeneity between the tools and development stacks of the different Blockchains/DLTs is considered a bottleneck to the adoption of the technology by developers. The Stellar certificate course, jointly offered by SDF and UNIC, aims to bridge the inherited gap. Moreover, the outcome of this project will enable us to further support the development of the Stellar ecosystem”.

The Stellar certificate course aims to:

• provide technical education for developers
• unveilexpose Stellar’s ecosystem of development tools
• explore Stellar’s multi-currency network and logic
• acknowledge the mission and actions of the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF)
• build the killer applications on the Stellar blockchain