Australia’s Monash University has opened a joint blockchain cryptocurrency research and development lab at its Clayton campus.

“The new lab will enable us to build practical blockchain-based solutions with rigorous security that can, in addition to digital currencies, be also applied in other application domains, such as digital health,” Monash Associate Professor Carsten Rudolph said.

Monash has signed a multi-million dollar deal with Collinstar Capital, an Australian asset management company and a market leader in Fintech, for the research lab initiative focused on developing the blockchain cryptocurrency Hcash. A node of the R&D lab is at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

“The main mechanism behind Hcash is a distributed ledger that connects block-based and blockless-based Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) systems, allowing ledger assets and information to be transferred between multiple cryptocurrencies. It has also adopted a hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) + Proof-of-Stake (PoS) for securing, governing and upgrading the network. As a result, Hcash is able to apply a more open governance model, where stakeholders have more input in the future direction of the protocol,” the official release stated.

In addition, the implementation of zk-SNARKs – a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography that allows fully encrypted transactions to verify as valid under the network’s consensus rules using zk-SNARK proofs – enables an extra layer of cryptographic protection, offering users enhanced privacy.

Dr Joseph Liu from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology and Dr Allen Au, from Hong Kong Polytechnic, have worked together for over ten years in the area of cryptography. They will continue their partnership with the establishment of this blockchain cryptocurrency Lab.

“The blockchain technology used to develop Hcash is superior to that of the Bitcoin technology,” said Dr. Joseph Liu from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology, “We aim to make Hcash a connecting point for all existing blockchain systems, potentially allowing Hcash to function as a virtual cryptocurrency exchange. Up until now, existing cryptocurrencies could only be exchanged within their own systems.”

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