KANALCOIN NEWS – Ripple recently came under fire for donating $29 million of cryptocurrency to public schools in the United States. Ripple said the donation was the largest donation in crypto ever made to a charity. This donation was also made to fulfill teachers’ requests submitted through the crowdfunding site DonorsChoose.org. The money will later be used to buy public school supplies in all 50 states.
Meanwhile, Charles Best who is the founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org, said he approached Ripple based on CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s previous involvement with the foundation. He sent Ripple executives an email stating whether it would be possible to comply with the teacher’s request.
“I was surprised myself, they said ‘yes’,” said Best, who founded the charity 18 years ago. “It was also very surprising because it became the largest donation of cryptocurrencies,” he continued.
Ripple is a company name based in San Francisco, they develop a network for faster global financial payments. XRP is the name of a digital token that financial institutions on the network can use to transact quickly. Ripple owns about 60 billion of the 100 billion XRP ever created.
Ripple’s donation is the largest so far the company has undertaken to develop social programs, according to Monica Long, senior vice president of marketing. But he said to expect more, and focus on education from fintech companies. Ripple’s XRP coin, is the third largest digital currency by market capitalization.
DonorsChoose.org agreed to liquidate the cryptocurrency to US dollars in just over 2 weeks. Meanwhile according to Long, this is a process of trying to avoid its influence on market prices. The charity’s policy, which also applies to donated shares of a company, is for immediate sale.
Ripple executives themselves are not the first in the crypto space to use digital currency as a tool for charity.
In December, as bitcoin was nearing an all-time high of just over $19,000, an anonymous donor set up an organization called the Pineapple Fund to give over 5,000 bitcoins to various charities. The donor said he would distribute $86 million worth of bitcoins to those who registered through this site.
This proves that cryptocurrency can not only be used as a means of hoarding wealth, but can also be used as a way to help others. Even some time ago Vitalik from Ethereum also made crypto donations to refugees in Africa.
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