While the US academic life has been turned upside down with the latest scandal called Varsity Blue, where wealthy parents and CEOs have paid millions of dollars to get their children into their dream schools, one company is making headlines with its donation.
The co-founder of Ripple, Chris Larsen, announced that he will be donating $25 million in XRP to San Francisco State University. This is the biggest cryptocurrency donation made ever to SFSU. Ripple is one of the companies that is serious about investing in new talent, research and academia.The Ripple University Blockchain Initiative has committed $50 million for funding that includes subject-specific research, technical resources and education across 17 higher education institutions around the world.
As Leaprate reported back in February of 2019, Initially, the donations were made to 17 universities including UCL, Princeton, MIT and many more. The demand for the program came after several major academic institutions like Stanford have launched cryptocurrency-related courses, both online and on campus. The Ripple’s Initiative got “popular”, as 11 more universities joined the program and benefitted from the generous research grants. Some of the new colleges included The University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon and Cornell.
The distribution of the grants is intended to be in the range of 3-5 years, and the universities receiving the money do not have special obligations to fulfil in order to get advantage of the program.
Cryptocurrency donations are not very spoken about, but are increasing at a steady pace. This shows the Fidelity’s Charity Report of 2018, which shows a significant increase in crypto donations from 2016 to 2017.