Bitcoin has come quite far over the past year. So far, in fact, that many people say they would not mind getting paid in it. Some, such as Elon Musk – the South African entrepreneur behind billion-dollar companies such as SpaceX and Tesla – have stated that they want their salaries paid in BTC, but some are now taking steps to make sure that this happens. One of those figures is Sean Culkin of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Sean Culkin Wants a BTC-Based Salary
In a recent interview, Culkin explained that he feels bitcoin is the future of finance. He will now be taking his $900,000+ annual salary as a football player – which he will receive on a weekly basis through Strike by Zap – and converting it all into the world’s primary digital currency by market cap.
On Twitter, he stated:
I fully believe bitcoin is the future of finance and I wanted to prove that I have real skin in the game – not just trying to make a quick buck. I will be converting my entire 2021 NFL salary to bitcoin.
To be fair, Culkin is not necessarily doing anything original. In fact, he is not the first NFL player to convert their salary to bitcoin. The first person to hold this honor was Russell Okung in the year 2020, a former player for the Carolina Panthers. He earned a reported $13 million per year as a player for the team and agreed to garner half this money in BTC through Strike – the same crypto transaction app that will be assisting Culkin.
In a statement last year, Okung explained:
Money is more than currency; it is power. The way money is handled from creation to dissemination is part of that power. Getting paid in bitcoin is the first step of opting out of the corrupt, manipulated economy we all inhabit.
While Culkin may not be the instigator of bitcoin-based salaries, he is keeping up an important trend, and he has since replaced his Twitter image with a picture of himself bearing laser eyes, a known practice amongst BTC fans. This same tactic has been utilized by the Winklevoss Twins and Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy.
Keeping Up the Digital Trends
As the primary back up to tight end Travis Kelce, Culkin mentioned:
To be honest, I don’t really view [bitcoin] as an extremely high-risk play. You see, an asset that grew to a trillion-dollar market cap in 12 years, which I do not think has been done in any other asset, the fact that it has had three, four, five corrections of 50-plus percent here, we are (near) all-time highs. When I started to break away from viewing volatility as risk, it did not seem very risky to me.
At press time, one unit of BTC is trading for just under $55,000.
