Over the last year or so there has been a movement in a couple of different American sports of athletes either becoming investors in crypto, wanting to tokenized their contracts and now getting paid in crypto! This is a huge opportunity for the crypto sphere as athletes are high visibility individuals. While it has been rough going so far for some of these projects/idea to come to be a huge stride was just made!
Footballs First Move
Russel Okung the starting left tackle for the Carolina Panthers today was paid half of his salary in Bitcoin. This amounted to $6.5 million of Bitcoin being paid to him. Okung has been a supporter of Bitcoin for a few years now and has previously tried to be paid in Bitcoin but was told he could not be. Since he still could not be directly paid in Bitcoin by the football team he used the company Strike, which handles moving fiat to cyrptocurrencies, who were paid by the team and then Strike paid him in Bitcoin.
Okung has founded a company called Okung Ventures to invest and fund companies in the cryptosphere. He has even written in Coindesk about his beliefs in Bitcoin as a digital gold over a year ago now before a lot of people where thinking about that. It will be interesting to see if the continues to try and get paid in Bitcoin or if he will change it up and get paid in otherones too!
Basketball Players Tokenizing Their Contracts
The first player/athlete I thought was going to be able to pull it off was Spencer Dinwiddie. He is a basketball player for the Brooklyn Nets who sadly actually partially tore his ACL yesterday. He wanted to tokenized his 3 year $34.36 million deal into 90 tokens that would be sold to accredited investors for $150,000 a token. These digital securities would be paying a 4.95% interest rate monthly and full pay out at the end of the contact in 2023.
Due to the unique nature of the choice he had to spend month in negotiations with the NBA before he was given clearance to do so. An interesting tidbit about these tokens was that they would be locked for the first year but then in the second they would be tradable. Part of the reason that Dinwiddie wanted to do this was to be able to access is whole contracts value up front instead of having to wait for the payouts. This was something I personally feel could be beneficial to a ton of athletes especially younger ones who do not have the leverage in negotiations like veterans do.
Dinwiddie's tokenization in the end was a far cry from what he initially wanted but he set a new idea in motion. He settled with the NBA to not tokenized his whole contract but rather a part of it.... $13.5 million dollars worth to be exact. When he was finally able to sell them and the window opened from March to July of 2020 He only sold 9 tokens to 8 investors for $150,000 this led to a total of $1,350,000. This was less then a tenth of what he had wanted and since then the talks from him about it have really been minimal.
The ideas that these two were able to come up with and try and pull off though were amazing. With sports and finances so intertwined for these players and teams bucking the trend is going to be hard but they came just about as close as I could imagine doing. Hopefully as the public becomes more and more aware of the uses of blockchain and crypto these players can help utilize it to unleash there own money!
