World famous television host and LGBT rights activist Ellen DeGeneres has received an unexpected gift: $4 million donated by Ripple to her charity, the Ellen DeGeneres Wildlife Fund.

The donation was made live by Kutcher after he appeared as a surprise guest on the Ellen show. He quickly announced that he and San Francisco-based tech firm Ripple had teamed up and would be donating $4 million dollars for her Wildlife Fund, days before Ellen herself is due to travel to Rwanda to begin construction of a mountain gorilla sanctuary.

“We [told Ripple], there’s this amazing human being and all they ever do is think about other people they can give to. Whether it’s in New Orleans, whether it’s in Montecito, whether it’s the people that come here … you’re always thinking about everyone else and we wanted to show you that people are thinking about you.

Ripple’s goal is to provide a fast and secure payments platform for transfers between individuals regardless of geographical location. Kutcher further demonstrated this by making the payment with Ripple live on air, converting $4 million US into 3.45 billion Rwandan francs instantly using his iPhone.

Kutcher stressed Ripple’s mission to be an ethical company which wanted to be seen to be giving back. This is not the only televised donation the company has made either: The Late Show with Steven Colbert recently featured a $29 million in XRP donation to fund more than 35,000 classroom projects in American schools.

Ashton Kutcher himself is an active venture capitalist, and co-founder of the firm Sound Ventures, which helped give Ripple its start. He has also long had bullish predictions about bitcoin and was an early investor in BitPay through A-Grade Investments, another VC firm he co-founded.

Ripple often attracts bad press in the crypto community with many seeing it as being to close to the traditional financial infrastructure that cryptocurrency was designed to break away from. However, public donations like this one shouldn’t do anything but good for the firm’s reputation.

Image Source: “Flickr”