Fidelity Investments Inc, an online trading brokerage of choice that offers IRAs, retirement planning, mutual funds and ETFs, has joined the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3), which is a group of academic institutions working on to develop blockchain technology, Reuters reported.

According to a company statement, IC3 will welcome Fidelity Labs, the innovation arm of asset manager Fidelity, as its member along with University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Cornell University, the Technion, IBM Corp and Intel Corp.

In a move to accelerate development and adoption of blockchain technology, the joining companies will collaborate to work on blockchain programs in order to help make financial
systems more secure, efficient and transparent.

“What IC3 brings is that academic computer science legacy that can help us explore how this technology can be applied,” Hadley Stern, senior vice president at Fidelity Labs, stated, explaining why the asset manager had chosen the group.

Stern added that the Boston-based asset manager is interested in use cases of blockchain that include the settlement of repurchase agreements transactions.

Based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City, the IC3 blockchain group performs tests and research on blockchain technology that meets the standards that are required to be deployed by businesses.

“Expected outcomes of our work include new blockchain and smart contract technologies that are secure, incrementally deployable, and efficient to meet the industry's needs,” Emin Gün Sirer, co-director of IC3 and a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, stated, as reported by Reuters.