Ripple has announced that it is donating donated $29 million in XRP to a crowdfunding organisation dedicated to the American public school system.
The money is going to DonorsChoose.org, a non-profit organisation that facilitates donations to classroom projects. It was founded in the year 2000 and in January 2018 announced its millionth funded project. According to its website, as of now it has funded 1,142,998 projects, reaching over 27.5 million students, and funding has been requested at least once from 77 percent of public schools in the country.
At the current market price, the donation equals just over 50 million XRP. According to Ripple, this money fulfilled every request listed on the organisation's website on the 26th of March, supplying nearly 30,000 teachers and their students with various school supplies and paying for field trips.
Ripple is the third biggest cryptocurrency according to Coinmarketcap.com, with a market capitalisation of almost 23 billion dollars. A message on the DonorsChoose.org website reads: "Our generous friends at Ripple kicked things off by funding all classroom requests on the site."
Philanthropic crypto tradition
Charitable donations made with cryptocurrency increased in 2017 in line with the growth of the industry itself. For example, 70 million dollars in cryptocurrency was donated through Fidelity Charitable in 2017, ten times the equivalent figure in 2016, according to Fortune. It began accepting Bitcoin in 2015.
Another example is the Pineapple Fund, an anonymously-run cache of 5,057 bitcoins (over 40 million dollars) set up in December 2017. It had donated over 20 million dollars as of January 2018, including 5 million to the Open Medicine Foundation. The OMF has had a Bitpay account set up for about a year now, according to ETHNews.
Similarly, UNICEF is using an Ethereum smart contract to allow people to mine ether and donate it to the organisation, which it intends to use in Syria.
Charities are advised to sell donated cryptocurrency quickly, because the market is so changeable. Eileen Hesiman, President and CEO of the National Philanthropic Trust, told CNBC: "It's interesting how volatile cryptocurrency can be in 24 hours. One gift lost about 12 percent of its value in a 36 hour period. Our policy is to sell as quickly as we can."
