According to NBA Sacramento Kings CEO Vivek Ranadive, the basketball club is now offering bitcoins as a way of paying salaries to everyone in the organization – including the basketball players themselves.
This announcement was made during the Satoshi Roundtable in the Clubhouse app. We are talking about the details of the announcement and the role of the decision of the team leadership in the future of blockchain assets.
As a reminder, this is not the first time that Sacramento Kings have experimented with cryptocurrencies. Last year, the club announced that it would be auctioning players’ t-shirts on the Ethereum blockchain. The proceeds from the auction went to help victims of Hurricane Dorian.
However, now the leadership of the team has gone even further. According to the statement of the general director of the club, now any employee will be able to receive his salary in the first cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrencies in sports
Ranadive made the aforementioned announcement after venture capitalist Tim Draper asked him to join the conversation as a speaker. Here is a quote from a Sacramento Kings representative outlining the management’s plans. The cue is from Decrypt.
In the next few days, I am going to announce that Bitcoin will be one of the possible options for paying salaries to our organization’s employees, including club players.
That is, not only basketball stars, but also ordinary team employees will be able to contact the cryptocurrency. Thus, BTC will become more popular and more widespread.
Recall that Sacramento Kings was one of the first basketball clubs in the NBA to actively work with digital assets. Back in 2014, the club included Bitcoin in the list of payment instruments for goods sold to fans, and in 2018 Sacramento Kings even began to mine cryptocurrency. A year later, the club released the altcoin Kings Token, designed to reward the team’s active fans.
Sacramento Kings love Ethereum
Will the decision to convert salary to BTC be beneficial for the Sacramento Kings employees themselves? Given the constant long-term rise in the price of Bitcoin, they can also benefit from fluctuations in the cryptocurrency rate. However, the opposite statement is also true: a sudden collapse of the BTC rate can lead to tangible losses in terms of the value of their savings – especially if the owners sell the cryptocurrency after the decline in value, that is, in fact, fix their losses.
This scenario does not rule out Allianz chief economic analyst Mohamed El-Erian. According to him, Bitcoin is still not big enough to be completely insured against collapse. Here is a quote from a recent interview on CNN.
Locally, Bitcoin isn’t all that big to collapse. On the other hand, such a scenario would be another challenge to the liquidity paradigm, where investors are simply betting on liquidity. We have already been very close to collapse three times. So be careful, you will never guess which small detail will cause an accident and congestion on the highway.
In addition, El-Erian suggested that the spread of Bitcoin to mainstream investors would continue. At the same time, the expert also focused on the role of governments in the future of the main cryptocurrency.
It is an asset that wants to assert itself, but it can only assert itself if governments allow it. Be careful, because not only are you assuming increased acceptance in the private sector, but you are assuming government tolerance, which I am not very sure of.
We believe that this point of view is erroneous. Yet Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are decentralized, that is, their networks operate thanks to the participants in the blockchain. Therefore, the government and other interested parties simply cannot ban activity within the cryptocurrency network. In addition, since 2009, BTC has been able to achieve its current results without any support from the authorities.
One way or another, so far, large Wall Street companies are actively investing in BTC and are not going to stop. And thanks to its growth, the crypto market is attracting more and more new investors. Also, as noted by Bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, you should not count on attempts by the authorities to fight cryptocurrency. BTC and other coins have become all too common and officials understand this.
We believe that the decision of the Sacramento Kings Basketball Club is historic. Obviously, after that, many other organizations will want to join the initiative or at least give employees the opportunity to earn cryptocurrency. This will make coins even more popular and desirable – and this is an indisputable plus for an asset.
