CNBC reports Ripple gives away $29 million of its cryptocurrency to public schools.
- Ripple donated $29 million of its own digital currency XRP to fund public schools.
- The donation is the largest-ever cryptocurrency gift to a single charity. It fulfilled thousands of requests from teachers on the website DonorsChoose.org.
- The money will be used to buy classroom materials for more than 28,000 public school teachers across all 50 states.
- Ripple’s XRP coin, the third-largest digital currency by market cap, traded near 58 cents as of 2:40 p.m. ET Wednesday, according to CoinMarketCap. The cryptocurrency is down more than 70 percent this year. All of the top 10 digital currencies by market cap have also fallen so far this year.
- DonorsChoose.org agreed to liquidate the cryptocurrency into U.S. dollars over two weeks, according to Long, in the process trying to avoid affecting its market price. The charity’s policy, which also applies to donated shares of a company, is to sell right away.
Publicity Stunt Donation
I don’t object to the donation one bit. But let’s understand the donation for what it really is: advertisement.
There’s likely no better way to advertise than to target school children who will tell their parents they got free school supplies from Ripple.
As of March 28, 2018, Ripple is trading at about 58 cents. It blasted from 25 cents or so on December 10, 2017 to $2.78 on January, 6, 2018. That’s over an 1,000 percent gain, if one rode to the top and cashed out.
Every rally since then has been a sucker rally. It’s down 79% from the peak, less than three months ago. Someone who bought at 25 cents still has a 100% gain, but for how long?
Fundamentally, why is Ripple worth anything at all?
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Roulette. Red is digital currency, black is physical assets. Place your bet.
There is one cryptocurrency that I am actually in and that I do hold is money without financial distortment: Monero. All the major darknet markets provide Monero as the alternative to bitcoin now. Its popularity is set to grow.
Sure bitcoin is used to do a fair amount of online trade but unfortunately the value conferred to it by that trade has been blown out of the water by financial investors who want to speculate on the future.
With regards to cryptocurrency, as all of us enlightened Mish commenters sure know: cryptocurrencies aren’t money because they aren’t used in trade. It really is as simple than that.
Also this may be semantics, but I don’t believe Fed reserves technically are tax payers money. Musn’t conflate the monetary with the fiscal now.
But I am outraged that government does fund public education – what a colossal waste of money that one is. I could run a daycare centre for the 3-16 years olds much more efficiently than the average public school.
@Mish Bought Raspberry Ripple. No regrets.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/maven-user-photos/mishtalk/economics/pY98QOHeFE2eAof6gA5bwQ/-EmjC4AW7E-SKaF-oKaeow
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-28/venezuela-tries-pay-russian-debt-cryptocurrency
{{{YAWN}}} ALL donations are advertisements. Congratulations on discovering it at least on one occasion!
Fellow ‘Dog’… I’m starting in on this today. I’ll let you know… I’m thinking Dog-Coin.
I thought Ripple was an alcoholic beverage? I think I would rather have that, awful though it may be.
Unfortunately, your are too late to the party. I like the guy who sold guaranteed worthless crypto. The disclosure stated he would pocket the money and the coins would be worthless. He made a ton of money.
“Of course, giving iPads to schools was giving something useful. Donating computer-generated fantasy, like cyber coins is something else.”
Not at all. The policy is to immediately sell the shares (in this case the crypto). That’s a cash donation, better than computers. The agreement this time is to sell the crypto over a period of two weeks. Look for a bounce in 10-14 days as the selling pressure subsides.
me too 🙂 /***** In case recession starts and I get laid off from my computer job and there would still be crypto market to milk *****/
P.S. I think my comment highlights what inevitably will happen with crypto prices in case upcoming recession would cause layoffs in software industry and crypto coin price would somehow magically stay high at least in the beginning of a recession.
;TLDR Crypto coin “money supply” is proportional to available software engineers. Amount of available/unemployed software engineers will increase in recession. Hence, crypto prices will be close to 0 in recession due to oversupply and cryptos are not a good hedge against recession. This for sure applies to alt-coins. May or may not apply to “the chosen coin”, if such thing exists.
I’m going to start my own crypto currentyc….
Ripple has no chance at competing with Swift. None of these currencies do. A government-backed crypto will eventually be required. I do not support that, I am merely stating the obvious.
Go ahead. It’s certainly better here than $2. As for the Fed, that’s taxpayer money. If it donated to schools you would have to be nuts if you did not object. Please think!
Why is ANY currency worth anything? Because there is widespread agreement. Same for cryptos. Ripple has some major advantages over other crypto currencies and existing currency settlement systems in terms of number of transactions per second. Ripple has the potential to be a serious competitor to the SWIFT international settlement system. That is why is worth anything at all.
And how much has the Fed given to schools lately?
I say sell the dollar, and buy the Ripple!