Thought experiment: imagine that I'm a huge multinational company who makes billions in profit. Imagine that I evade (or "optimize") my taxes as much as possible using all the tricks in the book. Now I decide to invest a few hundreds of thousands of dollars to, say, donate computers to schools. It's great, isn't it? But wouldn't it make more sense not to do that and simply pay my taxes instead, which would probably end up contributing a lot more to the school system and the rest of the infrastructure? Isn't it effectively an empty PR move to make me look like the good guy even though I'm actually saving a lot of money by not paying what I really owe?

I'm not arguing that Ripple did a bad thing but I'm not in the position of somebody receiving the donation but rather in the position of a 3rd party who has to form an opinion about it. Clearly this is a good action on Ripple's part, as would be Bill Gates donating $100 to some charity but morally speaking it's not like it was a huge sacrifice. I'm very skeptical of the ethics of these cryptocurrency organizations and I'm not willing to suddenly consider them the "good guys" because they made a (for them) rather minor donation. As far as advertising campaigns go it seems like a pretty clever move that may well pay off way beyond $30millions for them.

There's no "False" or "True" when discussing the morals of these acts, you can make a good action for bad reasons and a bad action for good reasons. In practice it's great that Ripple did this though, regardless of the reasons, I agree with that.