$25 million gift to university—and more than $300 million given: how self-made multi-billionaires Chris Larsen and Lyna Lam are redefining philanthropic legacy in the digital age
San Francisco State University’s Lam Family College of Business stands as perhaps the most visible monument to one of Silicon Valley’s most consequential donor partnerships—a $25 million historic commitment made by alumnus Chris Larsen, his wife Lyna Lam, and the Rippleworks Foundation that not only broke records when it was announced in April 2019 but continues to shape the school’s identity, curriculum, and global ambitions well into 2026.
The gift, made predominantly in XRP — the digital asset at the heart of Ripple’s payments network — was at the time of its announcement, the single largest cryptocurrency donation ever made to a university in the United States. That distinction alone would have been enough to cement the contribution in the annals of philanthropy.
But what distinguishes this gift, and the donors behind it, is the depth of personal and professional narrative that surrounds it. The $25 million was not a moment of opportunistic giving by newly minted crypto billionaires.
It was the culmination of a relationship between these two donors and this institution that stretched back more than two decades and was rooted in biography, gratitude, and a carefully considered vision for the future of business education.
Chris Larsen was born in San Francisco in 1960 and grew up, by his own account, as a first-generation college student navigating a landscape without obvious guideposts.
He enrolled at San Francisco State University and earned a Bachelor of Science in accounting and finance in 1984 — a credential that would serve as the foundation for an entrepreneurial career of remarkable range and influence.
He later earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1991, but he has consistently spoken with evident feeling about SF State as the place that made everything else possible.
After Stanford, he co-founded E-Loan in 1996 with colleague Janina Pawlowski, building one of America’s first online mortgage-lending platforms at a time when the internet was just beginning to reshape consumer finance.
During his tenure, Larsen made E-Loan the first company to freely provide consumers with their FICO credit scores—a move that positioned him as what he would later describe as “radically pro-consumer”—and by February 2000, the company’s market value was estimated at around $1 billion.
He left E-Loan when it was sold to Banco Popular in 2005 and, that same year, co-founded Prosper Marketplace, a peer-to-peer lending platform that once again placed him at the vanguard of financial technology democratization.
The venture that would bring him his greatest wealth and widest renown came in 2012, when he co-founded Ripple Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain company whose mission was to enable financial institutions to move money across borders instantly and reliably, at a fraction of the cost of traditional correspondent banking. By 2016, Larsen had stepped back from the CEO role to become executive chairman, with Brad Garlinghouse assuming operational leadership.
Favorable regulatory conditions under the new administration and a $500 million strategic investment into Ripple at a $40 billion valuation by funds including Fortress Investment Group and Citadel Securities in October 2025 sent Larsen’s personal fortune soaring.
By November 2025, Bloomberg placed Larsen’s net worth at $15.3 billion, driven by his approximately 18 percent stake in Ripple and 2.7 billion XRP holdings valued at around $6.3 billion, ranking him among the 200 wealthiest people in the world.
Lyna Lam’s story could not be more different in origin, yet it converges with Larsen’s in precisely the ways that define their shared philanthropic mission.
Lam and her family were refugees from Southeast Asia, survivors of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide who spent three years in refugee camps before being sponsored to the United States.
She worked her way out of public housing, eventually entering the technology sector, becoming a small business owner, and ultimately a philanthropist in her own right. Her family’s ties to San Francisco State University run deep — two of her sisters and several other family members attended the school — and it is this web of connection that explains why, when the couple ultimately chose to make their landmark gift, Larsen insisted the college be named not for himself but for Lyna’s family.
The naming honors her father, Quang Lam, who led his family in their escape from Cambodia, a detail that transforms what might otherwise read as a routine donor recognition into something far more personal and poignant.
The couple’s giving to SF State did not begin with the $25 million commitment. Since 2001—two decades before the gift was publicly announced—Larsen and Lam had been steadily supporting the university in ways that went largely unheralded.
Their cumulative giving to SF State prior to the major gift surpassed $800,000, funding scholarships, science initiatives in the College of Science and Engineering’s biology department, and the establishment of the Chris Larsen Scholarship Fund in the Graduate College of Education.
This history of sustained, incremental giving speaks to a philanthropic sensibility that values institutional relationships over transactional gestures, and it lends the 2019 announcement the character of a natural culmination rather than an abrupt arrival.
The $25 million gift, jointly channeled by Larsen, Lam, and their foundation, Rippleworks, established the Chris Larsen and Lyna Lam Funds for the College of Business and created the Lam-Larsen Fund for Global Innovation.
That fund brought to life five new programmatic initiatives: an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, an Emerging and Developing Economies Initiative, a Financial Technology Initiative, a Business and Education Technology Initiative, and a Center for Workforce of the Future.
The gift also endowed two faculty chairs—the Rippleworks Endowed Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Lam-Larsen Endowed Chair in Financial Technology.
The California State University Board of Trustees approved the renaming of the college as the Lam Family College of Business on May 21, 2019, making it the first named college in the university’s history.
The gift functioned as the lead contribution in SF State’s BOLD Thinking campaign, which aimed to raise $150 million in total, and pushed the campaign past the $136 million mark, more than 90 percent of its goal.
The vehicle through which part of the donation flowed — the Rippleworks Foundation — is itself a significant expression of Larsen’s philanthropic architecture.
Co-founded by Larsen and Doug Galen in 2015, Rippleworks was built on the idea that social ventures need more than money: they need operational and strategic expertise to scale.
The foundation was among the first ever cryptocurrency-endowed foundations, backed by Larsen and Ripple from its inception.
Working initially from Doug Galen’s backyard in the San Francisco Bay Area before expanding to an office in Redwood City, Rippleworks has since partnered with social ventures around the world to complete more than 450 expert-driven projects.
Through its Capital Program, the foundation has awarded over $300 million in unrestricted grants to growth-stage social ventures operating in sectors including healthcare, financial inclusion, agriculture, education, and economic empowerment.
The foundation currently offers catalytic funding in the $1 million to $3 million range to organizations demonstrating transformative impact and a clear pathway to scale.
Beyond the SF State gift and the Rippleworks Foundation, the Larsen-Lam philanthropic portfolio reflects a sweeping set of interests tied to the immigrant and refugee experience, civic life in San Francisco, and the responsible evolution of financial technology.
In 2021, Lam launched the A Khmer Buddhist Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering the Khmer people and preserving their culture, and its first act was a nearly $500,000 donation to support Cambodians severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic—providing ventilators, patient monitors, oxygen manometers, and personal protective equipment distributed through the Cambodia-based nonprofit Friends International.
The foundation also supports Cambodian Americans and refugee communities more broadly through grants, arts preservation, and community health initiatives, and Lam is currently overseeing the construction of a Cambodian temple in San Jose, California.
The couple’s commitment to refugee welfare extends well beyond Lam’s personal foundation. In 2020, they partnered with ICONIQ Capital’s philanthropic arm to launch the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award, a grant competition that invites bold, scalable solutions to improve the lives of refugees globally.
The initial award was set at $12 million, anchored by the couple’s own contribution.
Through the peer-to-peer fundraising efforts of the broader ICONIQ network and the participation of additional sponsors, the award ultimately raised $24.25 million — more than double the initial sum — and was distributed to five finalist organizations in May 2021.
The $10 million primary award went to the Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative, a coalition of six global organizations dedicated to putting refugee-led responses at the center of humanitarian work.
That award, reaching over one million refugees worldwide, stands as one of the most significant collaborative philanthropic competitions in the humanitarian sector in recent memory.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Larsen’s civic philanthropy in San Francisco intensified. He and Ripple each donated $1 million to five local food banks—including the Alameda County Community Food Bank, Loaves and Fishes Family Services, Saint Mary’s, the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, and Second Harvest of Silicon Valley.
He established a $1 million fund for wellness and community outreach projects for the San Francisco Police Department in 2022 and committed $1.7 million to Avenue Greenlight, a program bolstering neighborhood business associations across the city.
In April 2025, when the Fillmore Jazz Festival—the largest free jazz event on the West Coast—announced it would be canceled due to a $440,000 funding shortfall, it was Larsen who moved swiftly to step in and revive it.
More recently, in spring 2025, Larsen offered the SFPD a $9.4 million gift, channeled through his San Francisco Police Community Foundation, that included drones, surveillance equipment, and the donation of unused Ripple Labs office space in the Financial District for a new Real-Time Investigation Center.
That gift, while generating debate among civil liberties advocates, reflects Larsen’s longstanding and unambiguous commitment to the physical security of the city he has lived in and given to for his entire professional life.
On the corporate side, Ripple’s giving under Larsen’s stewardship has run in parallel to his personal philanthropy, most visibly through the Ripple for Good initiative, which the company formally launched in September 2018 with a commitment of $105 million—including $50 million to the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) supporting blockchain research at 17 prestigious universities globally, and $25 million in additional funding for education and financial inclusion.
UBRI eventually expanded to 29 university partners, including Princeton, MIT, UC Berkeley, University College London, and Korea University.
Ripple also made a $29 million gift to the educational crowdfunding platform DonorsChoose, funding all 35,000 classroom projects on the site in a single extraordinary gesture.
As 2026 progresses and the Lam Family College of Business marks its seventh year bearing that name, the original gift’s intent has not simply aged well — it has proved prescient.
The fintech, entrepreneurship, and global innovation programs seeded by the Lam-Larsen Fund have matured into a genuine curricular identity for a college that serves one of the most economically diverse and immigrant-rich student bodies of any public university in California.
Chris Larsen, now among the world’s wealthiest individuals by virtue of the very digital asset he donated to his alma mater, has spent his fortune across a philanthropic terrain that includes refugees, food security, civic safety, education, and the responsible growth of blockchain technology — a portfolio that reflects both the Silicon Valley entrepreneur he became and the first-generation college student from San Francisco who first understood what access to education can mean.
Lyna Lam, whose family’s name graces the building, has built her own parallel legacy, one that draws on the particular authority of lived experience—as a refugee, a community builder, and an advocate whose giving has always been most personal when it is most global.
Together, and through Rippleworks, they represent a model of philanthropic partnership in which institutional loyalty, personal history, and the power of financial innovation combine to produce gifts that outlast the headlines that announce them.