11 New Universities Partner to Accelerate & Fund Research & Education

The University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) was rolled out in June last year to nurture and accelerate academic research, development and innovation in the DLT, digital currency and digital payment sector.

Ripple has supported the initiative and committed more than $50 million in funding, expertise and technical resources to the UBRI’s first batch of university partners, which includes 17 esteemed academic institutions across the globe.   

Recently, 11 new prestigious universities joined the UBRI program. So it is currently supporting a total sum of 29 partners in order to push forward the academic research.   

The new educational institutions include:   

• Carnegie Mellon University
• Cornell University
• Duke University
• Georgetown University
• University of Kansas
• University of Michigan
• Morgan State University
• National University of Singapore
• Northeastern University
• University of Sao Paulo
• Institute for Fintech Research, Tsinghua University   

Advancing Best Minds   

These programs, which are goaded and run by the university partners, are designed to prepare the next generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, politicians, business leaders and many more professions to implement these technologies into practice. This effort will increase significant cognisance of transformative impact that DLT will bring across all sectors while giving back to people as part of the currently happening benevolent effort.   

Various academic institutions have embraced blockchain technology to be applied in multiple applications. For instance, the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, welcomed the plan of using blockchain to start certifying academic degrees of students, as Coinidol reported.   

The technology verifies the authenticity of a student’s degree with one click and students will be in a position to check the validity on the university’s website, hence bypassing bureaucracy. 

However, the Global Blockchain Business Council – a top association for the DLT community, carried out research on January 22 this year and uncovered that 63% of institutional investors believe that senior executives know less about blockchain. Around 7% acknowledge their DLT understanding as ‘good’ and around 30% thinking is ‘average,’ as Coinidol revealed.