Entrepreneurs and developers behind four different blockchain startups can add their names to the list of Thiel Fellowship awardees.

The Thiel Foundation, created and funded by billionaire investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, announced its 2018 class of Thiel Fellows on Friday. Among this year's recipients are Vest co-founder Axel Ericsson, Polkadot co-founder Robert Habermeier, MyCrypto CTO Daniel Ternyak and Mechanism Labs co-founder Aparna Krishnan, according to a press release.

They join the crypto community's most notable Thiel Fellow - ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who received the award in 2014. Each recipient will be given a $100,000 grant over the next two years to help them build their current and future projects.

In a newsletter, Allyson Dias, director of the Thiel Fellowship, said the purpose of the fellowship is to help young aspiring entrepreneurs to find innovative approaches to tackle real-world issues.

"Leaving behind the safety of the classroom and choosing to build a business instead isn't easy or glamorous. But our Fellows have found what we suspect to be true more broadly: young people learn best by doing things in the real world," she wrote.

Thiel himself is a noted bitcoin supporter. His Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, reportedly invested in $20 million' worth of bitcoin in January, as previously reported by CoinDesk.

The technology luminary was quoted last year saying he believes the critics of bitcoin are "underestimating" the cryptocurrency and calling bitcoin "a reserve form of money."

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