The Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering has been launched by the Faculty of Engineering of the Imperial College London, following the successful Bitcoin Forum last summer, held to assess the scale of interest among students and stuff to the topic.

Since the response proved “overwhelming”, it was decided to open a research center to coordinate academic grants aimed at designing and engineering improvements to blockchain protocols.

As stated in the announcement, the recent years have seen a “meteoric rise of cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin in particular”, thus making further research on the topic a necessity.

Speaking to CoinDesk, the head of the Centre explained that one of the main objectives of the new research body was to explore “novel blockchain-based applications across mulitple domains” and to broaden industrial and academic collaborations in that sphere.

Meanwhile, Imperial College London is not the first university to study and teach cryptocurrency-related topics. Earlier this year a Catalonian university installed a Bitcoin ATM to promote research and debate on digital currency. In July the US government awarded a 3-year grant worth $3 million to academics who explore cryptocurrencies. In August Princeton and Stanford launched online Bitcoin courses. A quarterly academic journal dedicated to the topic was established in September.

Maria Rudina