By Landon Manning
Saquon Barkley, superstar running back for the New York Giants NFL franchise, has announced that he intends to use the Lightning Network to facilitate receiving all of his marketing income in bitcoin.
Widely considered to be one of the most skilled players currently in the NFL, the 24-year-old Barkley has come to dominate the game of football since being the second draft pick for the 2018 season. In 2020, he tore his ACL very early in the season, and as a result was forced to sit the vast majority of games out. But as excitement builds about his presumed return to the active roster in 2021, Barkley has set out to make history for football and for bitcoin, telling the world that he will receive 100% of his substantial marketing income in the cryptocurrency.
Eschewing some of the more traditional media outlets for announcements of this kind, Barkley went directly on an episode of “The Best Business Show With Anthony Pompliano,” a daily YouTube show covering the world of fintech and cryptocurrency. He was also joined in this interview by Jack Mallers, founder and CEO of Strike, a Lightning Network payments platform that will be used to process this fiat-to-crypto conversion.
“I’m taking my marketing money in bitcoin,” Barkley said, claiming that he was going to be receiving the entirety of the substantial income he receives from marketing his likeness in bitcoin. Although the exact figure for this sum is unknown, it is certainly higher than tens of millions of dollars. Barkley claimed that he was looking for a secure way to save up this money other than in cash, to build up a more durable foundation for some real generational wealth.
“Now that I see [issues] with inflation and learning so much about Bitcoin,” Barkley said, “I think it would be the smart thing to do, the right thing to do, to start taking my investment money through bitcoin and through Strike.”
Although Barkley is the first NFL player to receive marketing revenue through bitcoin, he is not the first NFL player to back the world’s number one cryptocurrency so vociferously. In late 2020, Russell Okung of the Carolina Panthers announced that he would receive a “substantial” portion of his salary through bitcoin, but that he would also receive some portion of this sum in USD, and any marketing revenue would presumably be entirely in USD. Interestingly, Okung too reached out to Mallers from Strike, who helped arrange a workable system with the NFL.
Now, helping Barkley, Mallers stated that the system Strike would use for Barkley’s specific case would soon be available to all U.S. users in the next 30 to 60 days. Although the exact details have yet to be revealed, in essence it uses Strike as a middleman to convert direct deposits to a user’s checking account into bitcoin, by use of the Lightning Network.
Mallers is optimistic about the adoption of this new service, claiming that, “The problem that Saquon’s facing is a problem everyone faces, is that non-working capital, capital that you want to save … you can’t save it in cash anymore. And the inflation problem that Saquon is hinting at is extraordinarily real.”
With Okung having made his partnership with Strike near the end of the 2020 season, and now another football superstar making an even bigger commitment to bitcoin before the beginning of the 2021 season, it’s anyone’s guess as to what further adoption could be possible in the immediate future. Due to the actions of pioneers like Barkley, Bitcoin could very well have another easy avenue to become a normal part of financial life for millions of Americans. If nothing else, Barkley himself is personally already making critical decisions to ensure the preservation of his wealth, in an industry where it vanishes all too readily.
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