Sacramento Kings offers staff and players an option to get paid in BTC 2021

Renowned American professional basketball team Sacramento Kings is set to start offering its staff and players a Bitcoin (BTC) payment option. A report unveiled this news on April 6, noting that the team’s chairman, Vivek Ranadivé, previewed this information on Clubhouse session with Tim Draper. Allegedly, Ranadivé is set to give an official announcement later this week.

According to the report, this move will see Sacramento Kings become the first major sports team to let its staff and players chose whether they would like to receive all or part of their salaries in BTC. Apart from this, the team will also cement Sacramento Kings’ claims of being the most pro-crypto team in the professional sports sector.

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While the team interaction with crypto in the past ranged from accepting BTC for tickets and jerseys to rolling out reward tokens for its fans, it remains unclear how it will enable BTC payments.

Increasing crypto adoption in the professional sports industry

This news comes after the Dallas Mavericks announced plans to start accepting Dogecoin (DOGE) as payment for tickets and merchandise in the past month. Reportedly, the team joined hands with BitPay to enable this feature. At the time, Mark Cuban, the team’s owner said that the team chose to embrace crypto because it has the ability to do so.

While Cuban was bullish over the news of his team adopting DOGE, he ridiculed Sacramento Kings’ plan to pay players and staff in BTC saying that any player has the option to convert their pay into any cryptocurrency. He added that paying players in BTC does not change anything and that he would prefer holding his BTC instead.

Apart from professional sports teams adopting crypto, individual players are also dipping toes in the nascent asset class. An example is National Football League player Russell Okung, who converted half of his £9.39 million income to BTC late last year. Okung managed to do this through Zap’s Strike, a solution that enables the conversion of traditional paychecks into BTC.