Shortly after joining San Francisco State University as the Vice President of Advancement, Robert J. Nava met with alumnus Chris Larsen, cofounder of the online mortgage lender E-loan and several Silicon Valley technology start-ups. Larsen, who had donated to SF State in California, U.S., in the past, was excited about a new business venture he was starting. For the next half hour, he talked about decentralized finance and the emerging technology of blockchain.
Leaving the 2010 meeting, Nava and a colleague were baffled until they learned that Larsen was talking about digital assets or cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency, had been released just a year earlier.
Fast-forward to April 2019: SF State announced that Larsen—who by then had cofounded enterprise blockchain company Ripple—and his wife, Lyna Lam, made a $25 million gift to the university ($22 million in the company’s XRP cryptocurrency and $3 million in cash). Nava describes the historic donation—believed to be the largest crypto gift ever to a U.S. university—as “transformational.”
Other philanthropists have made large crypto gifts to colleges and universities, but recently inflation, rising interest rates, and global economic fallout from the war in Ukraine have pummeled crypto (along with other financial markets), eliciting concern about the future of these digital assets.
Volatile by nature, the crypto market appeared to be headed for a new low in June 2022, when cryptocurrency bank Celsius halted withdrawals by its nearly 2 million users, prompting The Washington Post to report that the decision “underscored fears that some of the sector’s largest companies are on shaky financial ground.”
Despite the crypto market’s tendency to behave like a roller coaster, experts say that crypto philanthropy is here to stay. For advancement professionals who may be nervous about making a foray into crypto philanthropy in a time of volatility, Nava notes that turbulence in the financial world often creates new opportunities. Institutions that are interested in accepting crypto donations should lay the groundwork now so they’re ready when a donor wants to make a gift using digital assets, says Nava.
He believes there is no downside to taking crypto donations as long as institutions carefully implement all the steps required to accept such gifts. Nava outlined those steps in a 2019 article that he cowrote for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
“Crypto donations may not be for every school, but the potential is there, and the returns can be substantial,” says Nava. “As advancement professionals, it’s our responsibility to do due diligence and think about how we present philanthropic opportunities to donors whether they hold crypto, real estate, stocks, or bonds.”
