Ripple Teams With Madonna To Help Malawi Orphans

Ripple, the blockchain technology company that makes XRP cryptocurrency, announced on Wednesday (Aug. 1) that it launched a month-long campaign in partnership with Raising Malawi, the non-profit founded by pop legend Madonna, to raise money for orphans and vulnerable children across the country.

In a company blog post, Ripple said that from July 30 through Aug. 3, they will match all public donations in support of the cause, and will help people sponsor children directly via Facebook.

“We’re honored to be a part of Raising Malawi’s amazing work with some of the world’s most underserved children, and are grateful to our investors at Sound Ventures for making the introduction to us and this important cause,” said Eric van Miltenburg, SVP of business operations at Ripple.

Ripple noted that close to one million children in Malawi have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDs, leaving them orphaned or without anyone to care for them. Since 2006, Ripple said Raising Malawi has served more than 10,000 of these children by offering direct healthcare services and educational support, including materials, classes and funding scholarships. The non-profit has also helped establish the first pediatric surgery and intensive care unit in the country, Ripple noted.

At the same time that it is helping the orphans in Malawi, reports surfaced in June that the company is facing a third lawsuit alleging securities fraud. “A private XRP investor alleges that Ripple Labs Inc. and its CEO Bradley Garlinghouse have conflated their token with its proprietary Ripple technology, and even illegally profited from price increases the whole time,” a summary of the lawsuit states. The lawsuit essentially centers around allegations that Ripple created billions of XRP tokens out of thin air and profited by selling them and pushing them to the public in what amounts to a never-ending coin offering.

“The nature of the XRP’s centralized and mining-free distribution model, all three lawsuits allege, has allowed for a continuous ICO period, in which Ripple Labs Inc. have been funding themselves by selling close to $100 million worth of their own cryptocurrency — and that’s just in the last quarter of 2017,” a report said.