Endowment from 1899 supports today's cutting-edge technology

From Pig Iron to Cryptocurrency

This is the story of how an endowment gift enabled David Sinton, a 19th-century pig-iron industrialist, to support UC's emerging leadership position in experiential learning in one of the 21st century's most cutting-edge technologies.

Image provided by the Cincinnati Art Museum.

In 1899, wealthy industrialist David Sinton donated $100,000 to UC to establish an endowment fund to provide a perpetual source of funding for an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics.

The current David Sinton Professor of Economics is Debashis Pal, PhD, a passionate nurturer of students and researcher into public policy improvements via better understanding of market function. Pal is also the managing director of the Kautz-Uible Economics Institute at the College of Business. Under his leadership and through the continued generosity of the Kautz and Uible families, the institute is home to one of the university's newest and most innovative endeavors.

A blockchain is a decentralized ledger of all transactions across a peer-to-peer network.

As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. In addition to cryptocurrencies, a blockchain can be used to maintain legal contracts, to enable artists to benefit financially from their work, along with a wide range of other uses.

Left to right: Woody Uible, Debashis Pal, Michael Jones and Dan Kautz.
Cryptocurrency mining rig that will be available at the Kautz-Uible Cryptoeconomics Lab in the new UC Digital Futures building.

The Kautz-Uible Cryptoeconomics Lab is one of the nation's leading university cryptocurrency and blockchain research programs.

Led by Michael Jones, PhD, Kautz-Uible Economics Institute academic director, the lab enables students to work directly with cryptocurrencies and blockchain. The lab and program are housed in the new UC Digital Futures building, located in the Cincinnati Innovation District.

Sinton chose to structure his gift as a permanent endowment. As a result, his $100,000 gift has been transformed into well over $5 million of value to UC and its many constituents. Structuring it as a perpetual source of funding means wealth that was created in the pig–iron market is now being used to fund research for real world uses of technology that was not even science fiction in Sinton's 19th-century world.

Under UC's 123 years of care and stewardship, Sinton's $100,000 gift has provided more than $4 million IN funding (40 times the original gift) and grown by 930% to over $1 million today.

The Sinton Fund, one of UC's oldest, is poised to reliably, predictably provide annual support to UC's Economics Department into its fourth century and beyond.

Script from David Sinton's 1899 letter regarding his gift to UC.