Veteran NFL tight end Sean Culkin will become the first NFL player to convert his entire salary to bitcoin — if he is able to make it onto the Kansas City Chiefs’ roster as the backup behind starter Travis Kelce.
Culkin, 27, will be paid his $920,000 salary in U.S. dollars but will convert it to bitcoin.
“I’ve always had a lot of interest in and a passion for finance and economics from my days at Mizzou,” Culkin said, ESPN reported. “Even before that, my dad was big, really bullish on gold. Early on, I was always exposed to his philosophies on what made gold an intractable investment looking at it from a macro perspective. There’s a lot of overlap between gold and bitcoin. I really spent all of my time in the offseason the past year just hearing about this growing space in crypto. It just seemed like it was getting bigger and bigger. Through education and learning and having a level of conviction over the course of time, I just felt like I wanted to be compensated from my services in football in bitcoin.”
While playing for the Carolina Panthers in December, free-agent offensive lineman Russell Okung announced he had converted half of his $13 million salary into bitcoin, which has since doubled in value.
Culkin is simply following Okung’s lead … and he’s not the only one.
Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, who is most likely going to be selected No. 1 overall in Thursday’s draft by the Jacksonville Jaguars, signed a multiyear endorsement deal with the global cryptocurrency investment app Blockfolio. In a twist, Lawrence accepted his “signing bonus” exclusively in cryptocurrency and had it deposited directly into his Blockfolio account.
“We believe that Trevor is the future of football, and we think that crypto is the future of finance,” said Blockfolio COO Sina Nader. “Trevor represents a lot of the promise and potential of football at the highest level, and we think that crypto represents the same thing at the highest level of finance.”
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