CHAMPAIGN — On Sept. 10, 2021, the University of Illinois received a donation unlike any other: A $100,000 donation in the form of Bitcoin, from Gies College of Business graduate Stanley Choi.
Since November 2019, the UI Foundation has received “maybe a dozen” cryptocurrency donations from benefactors, most of them under $5,000, said Michelle Bolger, the foundation’s vice president and controller.
Choi founded Head & Shoulders Financial Group, a brokerage and investment company based in Hong Kong. He’s also a successful professional poker player.
Choi spent just one year on the UI campus, earning his master’s degree in finance in 1996. But his time in C-U made an impact.
Robert Brunner, chief disruption officer for the business school, said he and Dean Jeffrey Brown got in touch with Choi through an advancement officer, Erin Nelson, in April 2021. The pair laid out their ideas around blockchain and how they wanted to implement it into college initiatives.
Five months later, Choi sent his donation: $100,000 in Bitcoin, instantly liquidated through the technology BitPay, to help support educational and extracurricular efforts about the blockchain.
“Stanley wanted to not just support it, but do it in an innovative way, and that was to give us a six-figure donation in Bitcoin,” Brunner said.
Choi is clearly full-speed ahead on cryptocurrency, the blockchain and its potential impacts on industry.
“Blockchain is going to change the way people do business,” Choi told the business school. “I think it’s very similar to the way the internet changed business. Thirty years ago, people had no idea how big the internet would be. They were skeptical and scared. There’s no doubt today how the internet has changed the world, and I see potential for the same magnitude with blockchain.”
So, what is a blockchain? It’s a database that stores information in digital blocks. Once each block is filled, it is closed and linked to the previous one, creating a chain.
Blockchains are critical for the upkeep of decentralized cryptocurrencies, as they maintain a distributed, immutable, public ledger of every transaction that occurs. The concept goes beyond just cryptocurrency, though.
For Brunner and other blockchain explorers, the appeal is in cutting out the middleman — facilitating “frictionless” transactions without a third-party mediator.
“Blockchain allows you to interact with people you may not even know, and you might not even trust them, but you can trust the right thing is going to get done,” Brunner said.
As head of the college’s newly formed Disruption Lab, Brunner is constantly trying to get a handle around cutting-edge business topics — think cryptocurrency and blockchains, artificial intelligence, automation, virtual reality — and how to fuse them with UI curriculum and systems.
Since Brunner and Brown met with Choi, many of these technologies have exploded in the public sphere, begetting new offshoots and uses.
“You’re talking about the confluence of technologies, and if they don’t add, they tend to multiply their effects, which can be even more profound,” Brunner said. “We’re trying to understand what’s possible so we can help educate our faculty and staff ahead of that bleeding edge, and inform our curriculum to prepare our students.”
Brunner led the efforts to give the business school its very own blockchain. It “cloned” the blockchain for Ethereum, another cryptocurrency, for its members to create their own private ledgers.
The first application: tracking “swag,” like coffee cups, T-shirts, hats and the like.
“It was becoming a pain to manage that,” Brunner said. “So we partnered with them as an experiment to track this inventory.”
Brunner hopes more hands-on experience for faculty, students and staff can speed the college’s education on the burgeoning technology.
“Blockchain has the opportunity to impact every aspect of our college,” Brunner said. “It has the potential to impact almost every area on campus.”
As for cryptocurrency donations, will colleges soon be able to hold onto the assets instead of instantly turning them into cash?
“We’re certainly in discussions regarding holding cryptocurrency, and determining the process in order to do that,” Bolger said. “There’s quite a bit of interest from Gies to hold crypto, and we’re exploring different options there.”
Choi’s $100,000 donation, adjusted for inflation and the value of Bitcoin, is worth about $98,000 as of Friday.
