Sec. 4. Distributed ledger technology research
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/bill/117/s/4109/is/section-4·A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
The Director of the National Science Foundation shall make awards, on a competitive basis, to institutions of higher education or nonprofit organizations (or consortia of such institutions or organizations) to support research, including socio-technical research, on distributed ledger technologies and their applications, with a particular focus on applications of public and permissionless distributed ledgers, which may include research on— the implications on trust, transparency, privacy, accountability, and energy consumption of different consensus mechanisms and hardware choices, and approaches for addressing these implications; approaches for improving the security, privacy, resiliency, interoperability, performance, and scalability of distributed ledger technologies and their applications, which may include decentralized networks; approaches for identifying and addressing vulnerabilities and improving the performance and expressive power of smart contracts; the implications of quantum computing on applications of distributed ledger technologies, including long-term protection of sensitive information (such as medical or digital property), and techniques to address them; game theory, mechanism design, and economics underpinning and facilitating the operations and governance of decentralized networks enabled by distributed ledger technologies; the social behaviors of participants in decentralized networks enabled by distributed ledger technologies; human-centric design approaches to make distributed ledger technologies and their applications more usable and accessible; and use cases for distributed ledger technologies across various industry sectors and government, including applications pertaining to— digital identity, including trusted identity and identity management; digital property rights; delivery of public services; supply chain transparency; medical information management; inclusive financial services; community governance; charitable giving; public goods funding; digital credentials; regulatory compliance; infrastructure resilience; and peer-to-peer transactions.
The Director of the National Science Foundation shall consider supporting startups that leverage distributed ledger technologies, have the potential to positively benefit society, and have the potential for commercial viability, through programs like the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. In making awards under subsection (a), the Director of the National Science Foundation shall take into account the national strategy, as described in section 3(d).
The Director of the National Science Foundation shall continue to make awards supporting fundamental research in areas related to distributed ledger technologies and their applications, such as applied cryptography and distributed systems.