VinUniversity Student Receives a Grant Worth 100,000 USD to Implement a Blockchain Project

Nguyen Minh Tuan – a VinUniversity sophomore – has just received funding from two of the world’s most well-endowed crypto ecosystems – NEAR Foundation (Switzerland) and Filecoin (USA). The two foundations have granted a total of USD 100,000 (equivalent to more than 2.3 billion VND) for Tuan to implement his project on developing a digital blockchain-based marketplace that helps authenticate personal information.

“With these grants, I plan to allocate 10% to operations and 90% to product development. In the future,  I aim to establish my company in Singapore and raise 2 million USD in the 1st funding round and value my business at approximately 20 million USD.” – Minh Tuan shared.

In order to carry out his project, Tuan recruited a team of about 10 people, composed of senior project managers, product developers, and programmers from leading tech companies in Vietnam, such as Viettel, Vinagame, FTX, Foxconn, etc. Tuan plans to base his company in Singapore. At the moment, the team has completed the demo – which includes the frontend (consumer interface), backend (server, app, and database), smart contract, and subgraphs (thegraph.com – an indexing protocol for querying networks). This September, Tuan will proceed with the next funding round.

The NFT “rage” – the spark to the idea

On March 11th 2021, an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) fetched a record price of 69.3 million USD. The artwork is a collage of drawings created using Blockchain called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days.” This news shocked the world and sparked the NFT “rage”. Influenced by this “rage”, Minh Tuan came up with the idea of an NFT marketplace where users can trade digitally-stored and encrypted NFTs, like artworks or personal information, thereby allowing for accurate and swift authentication of information.

The NFT worth 69.3 million USD – “Everydays: The First 5000 Days.”

Digital identity is a sensitive form of personal information, and thus an extra layer of protection is used to prevent leakages. The project also provides a paid NFT encryption service to encourage the use of NFTs.

“Banks and businesses can provide a better customer experience with the application of NFTs into personal identity authentication, such as customers’ personal identification number. Compared to the current method, Blockchain will help authenticate information faster, more accurately, and more effectively.” – Tuan noted.

New approach with more efficient features

In order to receive this grant, Tuan had been through various stages of project evaluation with specialists and professors – from the application round to the technical assessment round, financial assessment round, and the voting round. According to Tuan, the technical assessment round was the most challenging as he was confronted with tricky technical questions from professors. He believed that the project managed to secure funding because of its new approach, efficient features, and coherent idea.

“The idea proposed in his project is timely and essential, especially the digital identity authentication with an additional privacy protection layer.” – commented Prof. Kok-Seng Wong, VinUniversity Lecturer and Supervisor of Tuan’s other project at VinUniversity. He added: “Minh Tuan is an independent learner who has a strong motivation for self-development, having an excellent work ethic and can follow directions well.”

At VinUniversity, Tuan has taken part in research projects led by Professors right from his first year. At the moment, his research on “A secure federated learning framework” is being finalized for publication.

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The NEAR Grant Program was founded by NEAR Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation about blockchain headquartered in Switzerland. In October of 2021, NEAR Foundation announced an $800 million fund to help accelerate ecosystem growth and technology transferring process and create favorable conditions for communities of developers and creators. NEAR is considered a “big name” in the blockchain industry, and as such, the NEAR Grant Program attracts many talented developers looking to build or grow their businesses.