A new Swiss-based non-profit research foundation has, as part of its own unveiling, launched its first project for a “globally scalable decentralized payments network”, according to a press release on CR Newswire (Jan 17).

Called “Unit-e”, it is the first initiative of Distributed Technology Research (DTR), which was established with “the belief that distributed trust will be at the core of our society and that innovative new research and development is needed to achieve this”.

“A lack of scalability is holding back cryptocurrency adoption, and DTR’s groundbreaking research is addressing this,” said Joey Krug, Co-Chief Investment Officer at Pantera Capital which is a backer of Unit-e, and who is joining DTR’s Foundation Council.

DTR is funding a collaboration of top academic researchers from universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley, to work on the technical challenges of blockchain scalability.

Unit-e has a Berlin-based core team of “open-source and distributed systems engineers”, with plans for a network launch in the second half of the year.

DTR told reporters their goal is for a processing time of 10,000 transactions per second. Visa as a centralized network, for example, processes an average of around 1,700 transactions per second.

Cointelegraph noted back in October 2018 a study which found that blockchain technology is scalable enough to support day to day volumes of US equity markets.