Colleges and Universities around the world have experienced an increase in the amount of alumni donations being made in cryptocurrency.
Most, if not all, donations appear to be made by alumni wanting to share their good fortune in their digital currency investments. Last year was a fantastic year for crypto, as investors either seasoned or totally new to the concept of digital currencies and Bitcoin, made their fortunes very quickly.
It appears that many of these educational institutions were reluctant to take these, not so hard-earned, donations and some needed convincing. Nicolas Cary, the co-founder of wallet creation website Blockchain, says his donation of 14.5 Bitcoin to his old alma mater, the University of Puget Sound in Washington State, was hard fought:
“I had to do a little bit of convincing for them to accept it. They wanted to dig in about how it works and what the process would be. We had a lot of conversations.’’
The problem appears to be that many colleges in the US simply don’t have a process for receiving such donations. This is particularly baffling as the cryptocurrency industry is young in both its own existence and the average age of its adherents, which in turn increases the likelihood of the alumni making donations using alternatives to the dollar.
Even Ivy League colleges such as Yale and Harvard who have recently announced crypto investment funds claim it becomes much more challenging in terms of creating a process for alumni donations. Harvard as yet hasn’t received a crypto donation, although Yale would like to do but hasn’t yet established a method of implementation.
Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and the University of North Carolina (UNC), have all made investments from their endowments into at least one crypto fund.
Some of the reasons for the reticence up to this point can be put down to media hype; being associated with some of the bad press that occasionally sticks to crypto and other factors such as some of these currencies’ past volatility. Add to this, dealing with the IRS, and the donations can seem less attractive than those made in hard cash. However, with the recent crypto fund adoptions by some of America’s most respected educational institutions, this is likely to change.
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