MIT Bitcoin Giveaway Sent BTC Now Worth $110 Million

two MIT students, Jeremy Rubin and Dan Elitzer, launched an experimental program in 2014, giving each of the 4,494 undergraduate students at the school 100 US dollars worth of Bitcoin, totaling about 500,000 US dollars (half of the funding came from Hudson River Trading co-founder Alexander Morcos). The project aimed to study the impact of early adopters on the spread of new technology and received support from MIT professors and the school administration. Although the actual use of Bitcoin on campus was limited at the time, with the price of Bitcoin rising more than 220 times, the total value of the gifted Bitcoins has now exceeded 110 million US dollars. Jeremy Rubin later participated in the development of Bitcoin Core, while Dan Elitzer co-founded venture capital firms such as IDEO CoLab Ventures and Nascent.