Bitcoin in Sports

In September 2021, Russell Okung — an offensive tackle for the Carolina Panthers — made good on a promise he’d made two years earlier. He began receiving half his NFL salary in Bitcoin.

Okung had tweeted “Pay me in Bitcoin” in 2019. He’d spent two years working out how to make it happen, eventually partnering with a company called Strike that converted the dollar portion of his salary to Bitcoin automatically.

He wasn’t alone for long. Trevor Lawrence, the Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback, converted his entire $22 million signing bonus to cryptocurrency through Blockfolio. Saquon Barkley of the New York Giants announced he would take his endorsement deals in Bitcoin. Aaron Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes, and others publicly discussed their Bitcoin holdings.

The athlete adoption wave was interesting for what it revealed about motivation. These weren’t people who needed a savings strategy. They were high earners with access to sophisticated financial advisors. Their interest in Bitcoin wasn’t desperation — it was conviction about long-term value.

Okung described his reasoning explicitly: his NFL career would last a decade at most. He needed his wealth to last decades longer. Traditional financial assets, in an environment of persistent inflation, were a guaranteed slow loss. Bitcoin’s fixed supply and historical appreciation made it, in his view, the most logical place to store a portion of career earnings.

The athlete story humanises the long-term Bitcoin thesis. These are people making twenty-year decisions, not short-term trades.

Tomorrow: Bitcoin in art — Ordinals and what it all means.

— The Daily Bit