Saquon Barkley to Receive Marketing Revenue in Bitcoin
New York Giants’ running back Saquon Barkley has announced that he will be receiving all future marketing revenue in Bitcoin. Barkley has been a huge presence on the NFL field since he was picked second overall in the draft of 2018. Barkley explains in an interview with ‘The Best Business Show’ that he wants to take all his endorsement money in Bitcoin. It was later stated that this sum was roughly eight figures, although the exact number is unknown.
This has had a large effect on Bitcoin and the market as a whole, with bitcoin now up around 32,000 dollars, about 7 percent from the market’s opening today. This was working in conjunction with the news of Elon Musk once again saying that Tesla will likely start accepting Bitcoin as payment. These two things increased the Bitcoin investors’ confidence in the current state of the cryptocurrency market.
Barkley using Bitcoin will surely increase football fans’ interest in cryptocurrency. This has happened once before, when Russell Okung of the Carolina Panthers said he will take a portion of his income in Bitcoin in 2020, although he doesn’t have as much influence over the NFL as Barkley. Mass adoption of crypto is only in its early years and this news has most likely been a huge help in the process of converting the masses to the technology of blockchain.
Hopefully within the distant future we could see athletes being paid with crypto on a larger scale, such as a team paying players in Bitcoin. If the NFL adopts Bitcoin in this manner, then we could see Bitcoin’s market cap skyrocket. Other sports leagues would surely follow suit if this happened, causing a snowball effect that would drive up Bitcoin’s price exponentially. This probably just sounds like a whole bunch of ‘ifs’ and not enough ‘whens’, but sports and blockchain have crossed paths a few times before. The blockchain network known as Socios is a way for fans to show support for their team by exchanging ‘fan tokens’, or shares of a sports team. Their partnerships include F.C. Barcelona, Arsenal, the UFC, and many others.
I am a huge fan of Barkley as an athlete and I admire him for two reasons. First, because he and I have the same interests — cryptocurrency and fitness. Saquon Barkley prioritizes physical fitness and weightlifting more than anyone in the NFL right now. What’s more, he actually does weightlifting instead of just picking up heavy things. I can always value when a person is not only strong, but also has the skill to do movements like the clean, jerk, or snatch. Second, he stated that with his announcement, he wanted to have generational wealth to combat inflation. I am very much a fan of this because he is in the pursuit of money. Of course it may sound stupid to say that anyone in a capitalist society is not particularly in the pursuit of money but that’s not really what I mean. Barkley already has enough money to retire right now and live comfortably but his mindset is to never stop doing what he does anyway.
The news of Saquon Barkley taking his endorsement money will have a huge effect on other players making similar decisions to take their pay in cryptocurrency, as well as increasing general confidence in the current price of Bitcoin as a buying point.
