Ripple Labs has announced an additional $5 million investment to expand its University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) across the Asia-Pacific region. This funding will support blockchain education, academic research, and student innovation in six countries, including South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Australia.
The expanded UBRI reinforces Ripple's strategic presence in a region noted for its progressive fintech regulation and rapid adoption of digital assets. Total UBRI contributions in Asia now exceed $11 million since inception.
Key university partnerships include:
- South Korea: Continued funding of $1.1 million for Korean universities such as Yonsei University, facilitating research into areas like zk-SNARKs and layer-2 scaling technologies.
- Japan: Support provided to Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo, focusing on blockchain innovation.
- Singapore: Over $3 million allocated across Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore, with projects such as developing an autonomous AI agent network on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
- Taiwan: Partnership with National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology to research real-world asset (RWA) tokenization on XRPL, Ethereum (ETH), and Solana (SOL).
- Australia: Collaboration with Victoria University and the Australian National University to develop blockchain curricula and investigate blockchain law and smart contract platforms.
The initiative complements Ripple's other Asia-Pacific ventures, including the XRPL Japan and Korea Fund, partnerships to fund XRPL startups, and its role as an anchor investor in Asia's first institutional XRP-focused fund, the XRP Tracker Fund by HashKey Capital.
Ripple’s increased investment reflects a long-term commitment to building blockchain talent pipelines and driving real-world applications utilizing the XRP Ledger. It also arrives alongside other strategic moves in blockchain education and technology innovation worldwide.