In a recent blog post, MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative’s new Director of Research, Neha Narula, has highlighted the potential of digital currencies and outlined the future plans of the Media Lab in cryptocurrency and blockchain space.

“[I]t wasn’t until last year, when I realized that Bitcoin was the world’s largest consensus algorithm, that I began to understand its potential impact. Everywhere I looked, I found a need for a way to reach agreement with parties who don’t necessarily trust each other”, Narula wrote.

She said that the Media Lab spent the past on learning, becoming part of the cryptocurrency and blockchain communities, and establishing a point of view. The initiative runs classes on cryptocurrencies, and hosts weekly open research meetings to bring together cryptocurrency researchers in the Boston area. In addition, it funds a residents program to bring noted experts in the space to MIT to give talks and teach workshops.

MIT Media Lab co-chaired a W3C workshop to bring the community together to discuss standards. It helps support international conferences like Scaling Bitcoin, and financially supports open source developers to help them maintain their independence. It also sponsors students to attend important conferences like Consensus and Scaling Bitcoin.

Narula said that currently the team is working on projects that use novel cryptographic primitives for computation with privacy and auditability; create decentralized monetary policy through techniques like decaying assets and in-protocol inflation; examine bias in newsfeed algorithms and consider censorship-resistant mechanisms for publishing on the Web; securitize smart property to enable new models for funding in the developing world; and explore new ways of mining cryptocurrencies to ensure fairness and more open access to the system.

Speaking about future plans, Narula suggested building a strong research group, grounded in creating practical solutions.

“Our future work is going to be about research, but also convening”, she added. “This week, we’re gathering members of the healthcare industry for a life sciences and healthcare workshop. We will bring together experts in areas like monetary policy to think about a new financial architecture. We will work towards building out this open, interoperable data fabric in a way that provides security, privacy, and integrity to its participants, in order to support a new application paradigm”.