NBA's Sacramento Kings Players Will Soon Be Paid In Bitcoin, Says CEO

Vivek Ranadivé, Owner and CEO of the Sacramento Kings, said he would soon announce that all employees and players can get paid in Bitcoin BTC/USD.

What Happened: Ranadivé made the revelation in a Clubhouse discussion hosted by Tim Draper, saying, "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."

At the time of writing, details on how the team would facilitate these payments to players and employees remained unclear.

Why It Matters: The move would make the Sacramento Kings the first major sports franchise to offer its employees Bitcoin as a payment option and further solidify the team’s crypto-centric outlook.

In 2014, the Sacramento Kings became the first NBA team to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment for tickets, merchandise, and even hot dogs.

Five years later, the NBA team rewarded its most loyal fans with a crypto rewards token called “Kings Token,” an ERC-20 token that runs on the Ethereum blockchain.

With the market-leading cryptocurrency steadily appreciating in price since September 2020, most employees would have a hard time turning down the option of being paid in Bitcoin, even Elon Musk said he wouldn't mind it.

Me neither

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2021

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $58,052, up 1.82% in the past 24-hours. According to CoinMarketCap, trading volume for the digital asset was also up over 20% for the same period.