THE SACRAMENTO KINGS are set to become the first major sports franchise to offer a bitcoin payment option to all players and staff, team chairman Vivek Ranadivé said on Clubhouse on Monday.
The news was first broken on Twitter by Neil Jacobs, well-known on Clubhouse as a regular moderator for Café Bitcoin, who quoted Ranadivé as having said: “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.”
The move would strengthen the Kings’ longstanding claim to being one of the most crypto-forward teams in professional sports. The California NBA team began selling everything from tickets to hot dogs for bitcoin in 2014 and in 2019 launched rewards token for fans.
The development came even as cryptocurrency market capitalization achieved an all-time high peak of $2 trillion on Monday, as gains over the last few months attracted demand from both institutional as well as retail investors.
According to data and market trackers CoinGecko and Blockfolio, the crypto market cap touched a peak of $2.02 trillion by mid-afternoon Monday. The surge in market cap was led by the world’s biggest virtual currency – bitcoin, which touched its own milestone of $1.1 trillion, sustaining its market cap at $1 trillion for one week.
