July 31, 2025 – Theta Labs, the leader in decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media, and entertainment, today announced that Syracuse University has adopted Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid to support research led by Assistant Professor Junzhe Zhang, whose work focuses on causal inference theory and its applications to artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, and machine learning.
This milestone shortly follows Theta Labs’ partnership with Crypto.com as its strategic U.S. custody provider – a major step in expanding Theta’s presence in the U.S. As part of the collaboration, 15 million THETA tokens have been staked to Theta’s Enterprise Validator Node via Crypto.com’s institutional-grade custody solution, providing secure asset management and institutional access to THETA and TFUEL tokens.
Syracuse University and Professor Junzhe Zhang
Professor Junzhe Zhang is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University. Before joining Syracuse University, Professor Junzhe Zhang was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Causal AI Lab at Columbia University. His work has been recognized at premier conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, and UAI. His research focuses on developing robust and fair decision-making systems (i.e., agents) in scenarios where data is biased, incomplete, or affected by distributional shifts. This involves addressing core challenges such as confounding bias, selection bias, and external validity, forming the foundation of Causal Reinforcement Learning – an emerging field that integrates causal inference with sequential decision-making.
“Theta’s unique decentralized hybrid GPU infrastructure provides exactly what we need to scale our causal inference and reinforcement learning experiments with both efficiency and flexibility,” said Professor Junzhe Zhang. “There’s no other vendor providing this level of flexibility and broad access to a mix of community-run GPUs and high-performance options like A100s, H100s, as well as AWS Inferentia and Trainium instances. This enables us to accelerate our AI research without compromises.”
Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid: The only Decentralized AI Infrastructure for Academia
Syracuse becomes the 23rd academic institution to integrate Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid, further strengthening Theta Network’s footprint in the U.S. AI research ecosystem. Other participating institutions include Stanford University, University of Oregon, George Mason University, Seoul National University, KAIST, NTU Singapore, among many others.
Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid is the world’s first decentralized hybrid GPU platform, combining thousands of distributed community-run NVIDIA GPUs (30/40/50 series), high-end NVIDIA GPUs such as A100s and H100s, and just last week AWS next-generation Inferentia and Trainium AI chips. This hybrid infrastructure enables academic teams to run large and small scale experiments with greater flexibility, lower costs, and shorter setup times compared to traditional cloud providers. EdgeCloud empowers researchers to train large language models, perform causal and reinforcement learning simulations, and deploy generative AI workloads easily and cost effectively.
Key Research Areas Enabled by Theta EdgeCloud at Professor Zhang’s Lab
With support from Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid, Professor Zhang’s lab is accelerating foundational research across causal inference, reinforcement learning, fairness analysis, and generative models. Leveraging EdgeCloud’s hybrid GPU infrastructure, the lab conducts large-scale experiments in counterfactual reasoning, causal representation learning, and off-policy learning. These projects benefit from EdgeCloud’s ability to handle intensive computational workloads without infrastructure bottlenecks, enabling faster iteration and deeper exploration of AI systems that remain reliable under real-world data challenges.
Expanding U.S. Presence Through Crypto.com Custody Relationship
This milestone follows Theta Labs’ partnership with Crypto.com as its strategic U.S. custody provider – a major step in reinforcing Theta’s presence across the United States. Through this partnership, Crypto.com now offers secure asset management and institutional-grade access to THETA and TFUEL tokens.
“With Syracuse University joining as our 24th academic partner and our recent strategic custody partnership with Crypto.com, Theta is rapidly expanding our U.S. footprint across both AI research and institutional infrastructure,” said Mitch Liu, CEO and co-founder of Theta Labs. “Our Crypto.com relationship is incredibly important as we look to a future where any corporation, financial institution or fund can gain trusted and secure access to Theta’s native THETA, TFUEL and TDROP tokens. We’re proud to support Professor Zhang’s cutting-edge work in causal inference, reinforcement learning, fairness analysis, and generative models through Theta’s decentralized GPU platform.”
About Syracuse University
Syracuse University, founded in 1870, is a private R1 research university located in Syracuse, New York. It offers more than 200 undergraduate majors and 100 minors across 13 schools and colleges, including top-ranked programs in engineering, communications, public affairs, and business. With a student body of over 21,000 and a strong focus on global engagement and innovation, Syracuse provides a dynamic environment for academic excellence, research, and career readiness.
About Theta Labs
Theta Labs is the leading provider of decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media and entertainment powered by a global network of 30,000 distributed edge nodes and a native blockchain. Backed by Samsung, Sony, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Creative Artists Agency, Theta is among the top AI tokens on Binance.com and top 10 DePIN blockchains by market capitalization on Coingecko. Theta’s enterprise validator and governance council is composed of global market leaders, including Google, Samsung, CAA and Binance.
Recently launched Theta EdgeCloud is the first hybrid cloud-edge computing AI platform offering over 80 PetaFLOPS of on-demand distributed GPU compute power. The platform combines enterprise-grade GPUs such as NVIDIA’s H100 and A100, community-run nodes featuring NVIDIA 30/40/50 series GPUs, and now includes AWS’s next-generation AI EC2 instances, Inferentia and Trainium. EdgeCloud now counts over 40 global customers including 4 of the top 5 South Korea universities, top professional sports teams including NHL’s Las Vegas Knights, NBA’s Houston Rockets and global esports teams FlyQuest and Gen.G.
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