Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how much funding has been allocated to research opportunities for digital currency technology and its potential applications.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) leads the cross Council Digital Economy (DE) Theme, which incorporates the digital currency technology and associated distributed ledger technology activities, announced in the March 2015 Budget. To date, the DE Theme has invested around £7.2 million in the following activities:

• A £260,000 project - Third Party Dematerialisation and Rematerialisation of Capital.
• An 18-month £0.4 million project investigating the phenomena of cryptocurrencies and their associated underlying technology - Cryptocurrency Effects in Digital Transformations (CREDIT)
• A £3.7 million for seven interdisciplinary feasibility studies that will explore and understanding transformative use cases of distributed ledger technology “Applications of Distributed Ledger Technology” resulting in. Details of the projects are available on the EPSRC website at: http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewPanelROL.aspx?PanelId=1-3X22ML&RankingListId=1-3X22MS
• Three projects relevant to research in applications of distributed ledger technology were supported under “Broad applications of distributed ledger technologies” as one of six focal areas in a £10 million call for research proposals on the Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security in the Digital Economy call (2015) - see http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewPanel.aspx?PanelId=1-37PAUA)

Innovate UK has funded projects that develop and commercial digital currency technologies with various sectoral applications, related to blockchain and distributed ledger projects for use in areas like provenance tracking of goods. Since 2004 Innovate UK has invested nearly £2 million into these technologies.