“Russel Okung of the Panthers becomes the first NFL player to be paid in Bitcoin,” proclaimed the headline – and soon, some like this started to sprout up on the web, with sports, technology and conventional media jumps jumping to tell how the Carolina Panthers offensive striker finally fulfilled his spoken wish to be paid in cryptocurrency.
Unfortunately, the title is not true. “No need,” an NFL spokesman told me, adding that “your people are converting part of the money into bitcoin” after it is paid in U.S. dollars, just like any other NFL player.
Okung’s own team, the Carolina Panthers, also confirmed The Verge that teams pay their players in US dollars.
By this standard, anyone can have their salary “paid in bitcoin” whenever they want: just go buy some bitcoin with your salary after he arrives, which is probably what the company Okung is out and about – Zap – hopes that you do when you see that he is representing online.
It’s not clear why Okung chose this particular startup to convert his salary (she accepts direct deposit), or why he tweeted fourteen times this afternoon encouraging his followers to board the bitcoin and Zap train.
He does not reveal any kind of relationship with Zap on Twitter, although Zap founder Jack Mallers calls you “friend”. (Mallers did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
But even if Okung doesn’t have a deal of some kind with Zap, he would have some financial incentive simply because he is a bitcoin investor – the more people get excited enough to buy bits of bitcoin, the higher the price and the bigger their stake Vale . (Okung converted half of his $ 13 million salary into bitcoin, according to the Coindesk report.)
To generate this kind of excitement, it is useful to have headlines like “First NFL player to be paid in Bitcoin” spread across the web. It certainly seems more intriguing than “an NFL player decides to spend 50% of his salary on Bitcoin”, right? It will be interesting to see if any of these headlines change overnight.