Health-Focused Blockchain Project Secures $225k Grant from National Science Foundation

SimplyVital Health (SVH), a distributed ledger technology (DLT) based platform that claims to be focused on fostering trust and value in the healthcare ecosystem, has secured a $225k grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable the former to work on the integration of Graphene Protocol into its Nexus blockchain network which powers the SVH Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), according to a press release on October 10, 2019.

NSF Grants SVH $225k

In a bid to enable SimplyVital Health to conduct more research and develop cost-efficient blockchain-based solutions that would solve the trust and value challenges plaguing the global health industry, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has offered SVH a $225,000 grant.

As stated in its press release, the grant comes under the NSF’s Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) initiative and it’s aimed at providing SVH with the financial resources needed to conduct research and development (R&D) on the integration of Graphene protocol into its Nexus protocol which is compatible with its Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Though the team has hinted that the Nexus blockchain is still in testnet, it firmly believes the successful merging of Graphene protocol with its Nexus distributed ledger would greatly enhance data access in the healthcare sector and reduce costs, while increasing efficiency and scalability.

For the uninitiated, Graphene is a block propagation protocol that uses Bloom filters to identify unverified transactions in each block in the memory pool. This method significantly reduces the size of block announcements to just kilobytes instead of megabytes.

Supporting the Tech of the Future

Commenting on the development, Andrea Belz, Division Director of the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnership at NSF, stated categorically that the NSF remains dedicated to supporting innovative technologies by “funding the most creative and impactful ideas.”

“With our support, deep technology startups can guide basic science into meaningful, highly functional solutions,”



In August 2018, BTCManager informed that the NSF had given an $800k grant to the University of California researchers working on a blockchain solution called Open Science Chain (OSC)

Established in May 1950, the primary objective of the NSF was to support critical research and education in the non-medical fields of science and engineering; this venture into the fringes of technology proves that this ethos is alive and well.