Recently, San Diego State University (SDSU) announced that “currency donations are now welcome, providing a benefit to both donors and the university.”
According to SDSU’s press release, officials at the Campanile Foundation, the non-profit organization that “accepts and administers all gifts to the university”, say the first Bitcoin donation, which was received last October, “opens the door to similar contributions and a wide range of never-before imagined programs of research and teaching in cryptocurrency.”
This donation was made by “an alumnus who wants to remain anonymous” and it came via a “round number of satoshis, the underlying unit of account in Bitcoin, rather than in US dollars and carries a current value of just under $25,000.”
David Fuhriman, the chief financial officer of The Campanile Foundation, said that “the SDSU auxiliary will keep almost all of the contribution in the form of Bitcoin instead of immediately converting it all to cash as many other universities have done.”
Fuhriman calls this a “quasi-endowment” that differs from “the traditional practice of never spending the principal in an endowment.” Fuhriman said that in the “Montezuma & Satoshi Cryptocurrency Endowment”, which is what this project has been called, “1% of the holdings will be drawn off each quarter for one or more campus programs to ‘explore uses and discover how SDSU could interact with cryptocurrency and Bitcoin specifically'”. An example could be “assistance for a student internship to further research on how cryptocurrency might be ‘institutionalized’ at SDSU.”
Fuhriman went on to say:
“If the value of bitcoin goes up, then this endowment could last forever… We believe over the long run that this could be a really good benefit to SDSU… This is all new. It’s exploratory.“
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
Image Credit
Featured Image by “aherbias0” via Pixabay.com
