In a blog post, the foundation noted that the partnership that comes as a grant for the 12th BIU Winter School on Cryptography program also aims to push for more involvement in the Algorand blockchain.  Beneficiaries of the grant who are primarily graduate students and postdocs in cryptography will cover several topics, including advances in private-information retrieval and oblivious RAM, function secret sharing and homomorphic secret sharing, threshold signatures, and private set intersection. The winter school will take place from January 23rd to January 26th, 2022. According to BIU, as part of reaching a global audience, other interested students will access the learning sessions on YouTube.  Following the announcement, Algorand Foundation also invited interested parties to submit relevant projects for grant consideration. The partnership forms part of Algorand’s inroads to popularize its blockchain towards achieving mainstream adoption. In September, the platform inked a deal reportedly worth $100 million with the Drone Racing League (DRL) to power several initiatives based on the Algorand blockchain. Through the deal, DRL intends to introduce crypto-powered ticketing, collectibles, fan transactions, and non-fungible tokens. 

ALGO’s price 

The partnerships with various entities are likely to positively impact the price of Algorand’s native token ALGO. Over the past year, ALGO has surged in value by over 235% to trade at $1.74 by press time.  Interestingly, the token has performed relatively well compared to the general cryptocurrency market. Amid the recent market volatility, the coin has gained 45% from the recent low of $1.2 on December 20th.