NBA players Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala will take part of their next salary in Bitcoin and will each donate $ 1 million in BTC to fans, the guard and guard-forward of the Golden State Warriors announced on Monday.
“I’m with Bitcoin because I believe it’s the future of money,” Thompson said in an announcement tweet on Jan. 10.
Thompson and Iguodala have partnered with Cash App, the money transfer and bitcoin buying application owned by the financial services firm Block, run by bitcoin bull Jack Dorsey and formerly known as Square, to facilitate converting their salaries . The app also mediates the donations that are already live in the announcement tweets.
“Bitcoin is the future, Klay Thompson and I both believe,” tweeted Iguodala on Jan. 10, sharing his paycheck plans.
Thompson and Iguodala are the youngest to join a cohort of athletes who receive their compensation in the peer-to-peer money created 13 years ago by the pseudonymous individual or group Satoshi Nakamoto. Since its inception, Bitcoin has made massive gains against the US dollar, allowing its holders to dramatically increase their purchasing power as fiat currencies depreciate every year. Athletes have taken this dynamic into account and are now demanding payment in Bitcoin, a currency with a programmatically limited spending that cannot be changed.
The trend started when Russel Okung tweeted “Pay me in bitcoin” in the NFL in May 2019. In September of that year, the athlete told Bitcoin Magazine that he would not stop until he was paid in BTC. Although Okung wasn’t the first to ask such a question, he started a movement after achieving his goal a year and a half later, in December 2020. The athlete managed to get paid in Bitcoin indirectly through Strike, a Lightning payment app that handled the conversion of his annual paycheck into BTC. Today the service is available to all Strike users.
In November 2021, NFL legend Aaron Rodgers announced that he would take part of his salary in Bitcoin, while star Odell Beckham Jr. said he would take all of his annual compensation in BTC. In December, Patriots quarterback Mac Jones donated Bitcoin to his entire offensive line.
