Blockchain for Nonprofits: Ripple, RLUSD & Funding

Traditional money transfer can often involve multiple intermediaries, delays in settlement, and administrative processes that limit where and when money can move.

Blockchain technology offers the potential for faster settlement, greater transparency, and more efficient funds transfer. That potential became especially relevant to AOF in September 2025, when Ripple committed $15 million in Ripple USD (RLUSD) to support our work with underserved small business owners. What could blockchain mean for nonprofits, and how can innovation in the way funding moves create more opportunities in the communities they serve?

Why Can Moving Money Be Challenging for Nonprofits?

Raising money is only one part of the challenge for nonprofits. The next is moving those funds through programs, partners, and ultimately into the communities they serve. Multiple intermediaries, bank settlement times, cross-border complexity, administrative overhead, and manual reconciliation can slow that process and make it harder for funds to reach the people and organizations that need them when they need them.

How Can Blockchain Technology Change the Way Nonprofits Move Money?

Blockchain allows digital funds to move across a shared ledger rather than relying entirely on traditional financial infrastructure. This can potentially enable faster settlement, greater visibility into where funds are, 24/7 transactions, fewer intermediaries, and easier transfers across borders. Ripple describes its blockchain-based payment solutions as aiming to make financial systems faster, more accessible, and more efficient.

What Is RLUSD and Why Does It Matter for Nonprofit Funding?

What Is a Stablecoin?

Stablecoins are digital assets designed to hold a stable value rather than fluctuate the way many cryptocurrencies do. They’re typically backed by a reserve asset like a national currency.

What Is Ripple USD (RLUSD)?

Ripple USD (RLUSD) is Ripple’s U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, which Ripple states is backed one-to-one by U.S. dollars or permitted cash equivalents, with segregated reserves and redemption rights. RLUSD is a dollar-backed asset designed to combine the stability of traditional currency with blockchain-based movement of value.

Why Can Stablecoins Be Useful for Organizations?

For nonprofits, stablecoins can offer digital transfer capabilities, a value designed to remain tied to the U.S. dollar, and the ability to connect with digital financial infrastructure without the same level of price volatility associated with many traditional cryptocurrencies.

What Does Ripple’s $15 Million Contribution to AOF Represent?

In September 2025, Ripple committed $15 million in RLUSD to AOF. The contribution supports AOF’s work expanding affordable capital, business advising, digital education, and accelerator programming for underserved entrepreneurs. The significance goes beyond the size of the contribution. It demonstrates how digital assets can become part of nonprofit financial infrastructure and ultimately support entrepreneur financing, education, and business growth.

How Is the $15 Million Contribution Helping Expand Opportunity for Small Businesses?

The funding works across several fronts:

Expanding Access to Affordable Capital

The contribution helps us extend financing to entrepreneurs who often face barriers within traditional financial systems, expanding the pool of capital available to them for eligible small business loans.

Providing Business Advising and Education

Capital alone does not help a business grow without knowledge and planning behind it, so the funding also supports AOF’s business advising and educational programming for borrowers.

Helping Businesses Adopt Digital Tools

As digital tools become more prevalent in business, small businesses without access to them risk being left behind. Part of the contribution supports broader adoption of digital tools among our borrowers, helping small business owners strengthen their digital capabilities.

Supporting Entrepreneurs Through Accelerator Programs

This funding also supports the Ripple Digital Leap Forward Accelerator, an eight-week virtual program that helps small business owners build sustainable digital capacity. The program’s first cohort graduated 50 small business owners across 20 states with a 100% completion rate, and participants who complete the program receive a $10,000 grant toward technology implementation.

How Can Faster and More Efficient Money Movement Create a Bigger Impact?

Ripple’s RLUSD contribution gives AOF additional resources to deploy capital and business support programs to entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs can use capital and guidance to invest in staffing, equipment, and growth, helping create jobs and economic activity in their communities.

Ripple reports that its $15 million RLUSD contribution has already helped unlock $53.6 million in capital across 905 loans to 895 unique borrowers, creating roughly 1,000 jobs and helping retain more than 1,600.

The “Ripple effect” demonstrates how one contribution can multiply through an infrastructure designed to turn philanthropic capital into financing, jobs, and broader economic activity.

What Does Blockchain Mean for Financial Inclusion?

Traditional financial systems don’t serve every entrepreneur equally. Digital financial infrastructure potentially creates new ways to distribute capital, ease money movement, and connect philanthropic capital with opportunities more directly. But blockchain isn’t the only factor. Organizations like AOF are the ones who turn improved infrastructure into advice, support, and lending for underserved business owners.

How Are Nonprofits Already Using Blockchain Beyond Small Business Lending?

Ripple’s partnership with AOF isn’t the only nonprofit application of RLUSD. In Kenya, Ripple has supported a pilot with Mercy Corps Ventures that uses RLUSD as a form of drought insurance for rural communities. When satellite-derived vegetation data signals a drought, smart contracts automatically release RLUSD payments to affected herders, without waiting on traditional aid or insurance processing. It’s not the same as providing investment opportunities, but the same idea is at the core: moving funds faster and more transparently to where they’re needed.

What Should Nonprofits Consider Before Using Blockchain-Based Funding?

Blockchain is not a fit for every organization. Nonprofits need to consider regulatory compliance, the structure and reserves behind any stablecoin involved, custody and conversion between digital and traditional currency, accounting and reporting requirements, cybersecurity, and whether staff have the knowledge and systems to manage the technology responsibly. The most important question is not whether blockchain is new or innovative. It is whether the technology can make a specific financial process more efficient, transparent, or effective than the alternatives available to the organization.

What Can the Ripple and AOF Partnership Teach Us About the Future of Philanthropy?

Technology, philanthropy, mission-driven lending, and education working together offer a look at how future philanthropy could operate. The form of the contribution reflects the financial infrastructure Ripple is building, while its use supports AOF’s mission of expanding economic mobility.

How Is AOF Turning Ripple’s Contribution into Opportunity?

Ripple’s $15 million RLUSD contribution gives AOF additional resources to expand a model built around more than financing alone. Through affordable term loans, business advising, educational resources, and accelerator programs, AOF is working to turn access to capital and technology into sustainable opportunities for small business owners historically underserved by traditional financial institutions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can blockchain help nonprofits move money faster?

By settling transactions on a shared digital ledger rather than through multiple intermediaries, blockchain may reduce delays compared to traditional funds transfer.

What is RLUSD?

Ripple USD is a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin designed for payments and other digital financial applications.

How much did Ripple contribute to Accion Opportunity Fund?

Ripple committed $15 million in RLUSD to AOF in September 2025.

What is Ripple’s $15 million contribution being used for?

The contribution has supported affordable capital, digital capabilities, business advice and education, and accelerator programs supporting underserved small businesses.

How can stablecoins be used by nonprofits?

Stablecoin could be used for donations, grants, aid distribution, and cross-border transfers, as long as appropriate compliance and infrastructure is in place.

Is RLUSD the same as cryptocurrency?

RLUSD is a stablecoin, designed to hold a steady value that’s tied to the US dollar, unlike more volatile cryptocurrencies.

Can blockchain improve financial inclusion?

Blockchain can reduce friction and enable new digital financial infrastructure but doesn’t eliminate barriers to inclusion alone.

How does AOF support underserved small businesses?

AOF offers affordable financing, advising, education, and accelerator programs for entrepreneurs historically underserved by traditional lenders.

What is the Ripple Digital Leap Forward Accelerator?

The accelerator is an eight-week virtual program supported by the partnership that helps small business owners build digital capabilities and systems for sustainable growth.