I don't think anything worthy will come out of this
Though I won't be surprised if they end up spending a few million dollars from grants or even taxpayer's money without producing anything working and usable. Maybe, that's what the whole shebang is all about. These eggheads can pretty smart in such questions. Cryptocurrency was a Klondike during the last couple of years, and it is in fact surprising that these academics didn't come up with something like this earlier. Well, maybe, they are not that smart actually
I remember as some dude here promised a super-duper fancy coin to be released in February, though he didn't specify the February of which year exactly. And it was like two years ago. I haven't heard from him lately
I agree with that. Looks like the next "big" project.
As Tone Vays said, nothing is better than Bitcoin by now
I'm afraid these dudes are late to the party
Nevertheless, if they think that they do have something valuable to offer, why not join Bitcoin's developers (or developers of some other respectable altcoin)? If they consider their idea too radical to be included directly in Bitcoin (which is understandable), they can easily create a sort of "spin-off" project (not to be confused with a hard fork) in the same way as other Bitcoin-based or coin agnostic projects did like RSK, TumbleBit, Schnorr Signatures, and even the already mentioned Lightning Network itself