War-Torn OG Drops 100K XRP Bag, Transforms Hospital into a Web3 Healing Node

Seoul National University Hospital just had its crypto wallet pinged, announcing Thursday it received a fat stack of 100,000 XRP from a 79-year-old degen named Kim Geo-seok. Worth a cool 210 million won (roughly $145,000), this move is Kim's second on-chain transaction to the hospital, following a full bitcoin sent last November—proving he's not just a one-coin wonder.

Kim's origin story is the ultimate Korean War-era grindset. Orphaned at four when the conflict ripped his family apart, he grew up in a Jeju Island orphanage, complete with a facial scar from a partisan attack—his first, and most literal, battle scar. After returning to Seoul, he hustled through odd jobs, famously scaled Namsan Tower at 19, and swore he'd own a piece of the city's skyline. A self-taught investor who mainlined financial newspapers and took alpha from Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch, he once got liquidated on a bad stock bet so hard he lost his house. He then spent five brutal winters as a hotel security guard, stacking sats of fiat until he could rebuild his portfolio from the ground up.

In a May 2025 interview with Maeil Business Newspaper, Kim dropped some wisdom, stressing that spending smart matters more than earning big, and that true generational wealth is measured by your ability to give it away—a sentiment that would make any crypto philanthropist nod in approval.

To date, Kim has deployed a staggering 1.27 billion won into Seoul National University Hospital's treasury. His charitable airdrops don't stop there; he also funds free clinics at Red Cross hospitals and supports the Community Chest of Korea. He initiated his high-value giving spree in 2018 via the Community Chest, leveled up to the Red Cross "Super High-Value Donors Club" last year, and has pledged a total of 1 billion won to the Red Cross specifically for free clinics serving the uninsured and multicultural families.

South Korea's Financial Services Commission finally gave nonprofits the green light to cash out crypto donations in mid-2025, and Kim was first in line for the IRL bridge. His August 2025 one-bitcoin donation to the Red Cross became the nation's first recorded individual crypto donation to a nonprofit. He's since replicated that trade four more times across both institutions. Both Seoul National University Hospital and the Red Cross follow internal policy by instantly converting his crypto gifts to fiat via Upbit—no diamond-handing the donation, apparently.

At a March 9 ceremony for his latest Red Cross donation, Kim shared a simple, based hope: that crypto-based philanthropy becomes so normal it stops being news. Hospital director Kim Young-tae called the XRP donation a meaningful case study in digital-asset charity, noting the funds will be pumped into the hospital's development fund and its children's medical center. At 79, this former war orphan-turned-crypto O.G. shows no signs of retiring his ledger and still dreams of becoming Korea's ultimate individual donor—proof that you're never too old to make your bag count.