UC Berkeley Launches Center for Digital Assets with $1.3M Ripple Gift
UC Berkeley launches Center for Digital Assets with $1.3M Ripple gift to use blockchain and digital twin technologies for secure asset valuation and exchange.
UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering has launched the new Center for Digital Assets (CDA), a research initiative that will harness blockchain and digital twin technologies to rethink how physical assets are captured, valued, verified and exchanged in a digital world. The center aims to create secure, auditable frameworks that bridge the physical and digital economies.
The CDA will bring together faculty and students from mechanical engineering, computer science, business, and law to develop interoperable systems that use blockchain for immutable records and digital twins to model real-world assets. By combining these technologies, researchers hope to improve provenance tracking, enable automated verification, and reduce transaction friction across industries such as supply chain, real estate, and digital marketplaces.
Foundational funding for the Center for Digital Assets comes from Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI). Ripple provided a $1.3M gift to seed the CDA, supporting interdisciplinary research, graduate fellowships, and pilot projects. This investment underscores the growing role of university-industry partnerships in accelerating applied blockchain research and translating academic insights into real-world solutions.
Research at the CDA will focus on practical challenges: how to accurately capture physical asset attributes as digital twins, how to register those twins on secure blockchain ledgers, and how to establish standards for valuing and exchanging tokenized assets. Potential applications include provenance for manufactured goods, secure transfer of property rights, fractional ownership of high-value items, and automated settlement systems for IoT-enabled devices.
Beyond technology development, the Center for Digital Assets will emphasize policy, ethics, and education. The CDA plans to host workshops on regulatory compliance, data privacy, and equitable access to digital asset markets. Students will gain hands-on experience with blockchain platforms and digital twin modeling, preparing a new generation of engineers and policymakers to lead in the digital asset space.
With Ripple’s $1.3M gift and UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary expertise, the Center for Digital Assets is positioned to influence how industries capture, verify, and trade value in the digital era. The initiative represents a significant step toward trustworthy, scalable infrastructure for tokenized assets and signals Berkeley’s continued leadership in innovation at the intersection of engineering, finance, and policy.