Ripple and UC Berkeley Introduce UDAX Program to Grow XRP Ledger Ecosystem

Key Takeaways:

• The first batch consisted of nine startups that specialized in such areas as tokenized capital markets, decentralized insurance, and the creator economy.
• The teams that participated indicated an average of 67 percent increase in product maturity and 92 percent growth in confidence in fundraising after six weeks of pilot.
• Ripple recently reported that the first group of participants in its University Digital Asset Xcelerator, a joint program with the University of California, Berkeley, graduated. The program acts as a special channel through which blockchain ideas can be transferred out of a campus environment and into the financial market.

The University Digital Asset Xcelerator (UDAX) has been unveiled by Ripple and UC Berkeley to liaise between early academic innovation and institutional blockchain implementation.

The UDAX program was an expansion of the decades-old University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) launched by Ripple that has been funding academic research over the years. The new accelerator targets specifically those startups that are developed on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), who will receive technical support and mentorship by the Ripple engineers. The program tries to address the problem of the valley of death by matching student founders with industry veterans, since many promising blockchain projects do not have an institutional-grade business.

In the course of the six-week intensive pilot, nine startups have been striving to perfect their business models and code. The curriculum ended with a demo day, hosted at the headquarters of Ripple in San Francisco, where the founders pitched their projects to 13 venture capital firms and developers of core XRPL. This was the bridge that helped to bridge theoretical research and guided it towards the practical needs of the crypto investment community.

Some of the startups in the cohort showed a great level of growth in the course of their stay in the program. WaveTip is an instant tipping platform that became successful on social media switching to the XRPL Mainnet and deployed its service on the Chrome Web Store. Another player, X-Card, specialized in the tokenization of real-world items, having deposited over 1.5 million items of inventory and finding merchants.

The financial sector also gained momentum with such projects as the CRX Digital Assets. The accelerator saw the team export Brazilian credit products into international markets, increasing their tokenized volume to $58 million as compared to the initial volume of $39 million. Meanwhile, Blockroll incorporated the Ripple RLUSD stablecoin to support digital cards of African freelancers, which is an indication of the usefulness of the ledger in cross-border remittances.

Read More: Ripple’s $1.2B RLUSD Stablecoin Wins ADGM Approval Targeting Middle East Institutionals

Specific growth measures that were given by the participants were used to measure the results of the pilot.

• Product Maturity: There was an average of 67% growth in technical and operational readiness in teams.
• Fundraising Confidence: Founders had an average improvement in their confidence about external capital of 92% improvement.
• Strategic Growth: Startups such as EXFIL had increased their user base twice when concentrating on blockchain threat intelligence.

It is based on this collaborative model, which implies a change in the way blockchain firms relate to universities. However, instead of just giving grants to do their general research, the emphasis is shifting to producing particular, deployable tools that can instantly add liquidity and functionality to a particular network, such as the XRP Ledger.

Read More: Ripple and SBI to Launch RLUSD Stablecoin in Japan’s $300B Market by 2026

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