U.S. Professional Basketball Club to Pay Players and Staff in Bitcoin (BTC)
Sacramento Kings has announced plans to start paying players and its staffers’ salaries in bitcoin (BTC). The American professional basketball team has been accepting bitcoin payments for merchandise since 2014, according to a Forbes report on April 5, 2021.
Sacramento Kings Goes All in on Bitcoin (BTC)
In another exciting development for the burgeoning distributed ledger technology (DLT) and cryptocurrency industry, the Sacramento Kings, a member of the National Basketball Association (NBA) established in 1923, has announced plans to up its bitcoin (BTC) adoption game a bit.
Specifically, Vivek Ranadive, the Chairman, CEO, and Governor of the American professional basketball club revealed via Clubhouse, an invitation-only audio-chat application available only on iPhone, that everyone in the Sacramento Kings will be able to opt in to receive part or all of their salaries in bitcoin in the coming days.
In his words:
“I’m going to announce in the next few days that I’m going to offer everyone in the Kings organization, they can get paid as much of their salary in bitcoin as they want, including the players.”
Bitcoin Gone Mainstream?
Ranadive says one of his objectives as the chair of the sports outfit has always been to use the franchise to promote innovative technologies like Bitcoin and the club has been at the frontline of the blockchain technology movement over the years.
“When I sold the NBA on keeping the team in Sacramento, my pitch included using the sports franchise as a social network to push the technology envelope,” he added.
As reported by BTCManager in June 2018, the Ranadive-led organization initiated a charity campaign dubbed MiningForGood, which aims to mine ether (ETH) and use the proceeds to help the local community.
In October 2019, Sacramento Kings joined forces with Blockparty to launch a blockchain-based digital token reward program designed to reward its loyal fans. And in 2020, the club rolled out a DLT-based auction platform, in a bid to curb merchandise counterfeiting.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have continued to attract serious attention from various spheres of the global economy, as cryptos have proven to be a solid store of value and hedge against great monetary inflation.
At press time, the global cryptocurrency market is valued at $1.98 trillion, with the bitcoin (BTC) price sitting at $58,893, as seen on CoinMarketCap.
