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Senior ContributorOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Advisor, Bitcoin Policy Institute & Chair, Value Technology Foundation
This article is more than 3 years old.
Vivek Ranadivé, the Chairman, CEO, and Governor of the Sacramento Kings, announced this evening on Clubhouse that everyone in his organization could receive their pay in as much Bitcoin as they wanted. The story broke soon thereafter after a Tweet from a member of the Clubhouse audience.
I happened to be in the room, hosted by a club called the ‘Satoshi Roundtable’ when Tim Draper, a venture capitalist well-known in the industry for purchasing Bitcoin from the U.S. Marshall’s auction in 2014, called on Vivek Ranadivé to join him on the stage. The room was co-hosted by Bruce Fenton, a well-known Bitcoin advocate and investor since 2012 and was called ‘Draper and Friends’.
"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,” said Ranadivé, according to Neil Jacobs, well-known on Clubhouse as a regular moderator for Café Bitcoin, broke the news on Twitter that was soon confirmed and reported by CoinDesk.
The Sacramento Kings announced in 2014 they would accept Bitcoin as payment for merchandise in their team store in partnership with payment processor BitPay. At that time, Ranadivé stated to ESPN that, "When I sold the NBA on keeping the team in Sacramento, my pitch included using the sports franchise as a social network to push the technology envelope." Ranadivé elaborated that accepting Bitcoin then was one step closer to fans leaving their wallets at home, as his own kids would ask him why the Kings didn’t accept Bitcoin.
As Bitcoin continues to grow in popularity and mainstream acceptance, numerous organizations from major U.S. banks, PayPalPYPL and even Chipotle are starting to offer services related Bitcoin, whether it is a custody service, to use as payments, or part of a promotion. Elon Musk’s announcement earlier this year that TeslaTSLA would accept Bitcoin as payments seems to have started the trend among corporations in using the virtual currency as part of its marketing strategy.
Meanwhile, spending time on Clubhouse discussing Bitcoin can attract and provide access to those who usually engaging in a conversation would be quite difficult to do so. Just two days ago, Michael Saylor, CEO of MicrostrategyMSTR, dropped into a room with fellow Bitcoiners and answered their questions for about an hour, demonstrating the power of access that the app provides and what led to the news from Ranadivé and the Sacramento Kings.
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I am a former U.S. Regulator where I served with the FDIC during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in finance and capital markets, with experience in safety and soundness, compliance, and bank secrecy act examinations. I also served as a consultant and compliance examiner for the Making Home Affordable Program (HAMP) - Compliance, where the U.S. Department of the Treasury would review our reports to determine how the largest mortgage servicing companies complied with the rules of the program and provided consumers the opportunity to be considered for a 40-year low-interest mortgage based on the impacts of the GFC to their family.
While at the FDIC, I provided inputs on issues impacting the largest banks and systemic risks during the GFC such as deposit run analysis, research on synthetic collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, compilation of the exposure of net notional derivatives in the financial system, and analysis of new programs created by the Federal Reserve Board to stabilize the economy. During this time, I became interested in the way the Government provides trust in the financial system and the various risks involved with social media's coverage of the IndyMac bank run and what run risk looked like if individuals primarily did their banking through their personal computers or phones over the Internet.
In 2016, I entered into the blockchain industry with the Chamber of Digital Commerce as Director of Operations. I helped provide a monthly newsletter and supported various working groups in the international, federal, and state arenas for emerging technology and policy issues for cryptocurrency and blockchain. In 2017, I worked as the Policy Ambassador for ConsenSys and the Ethereum network.
After these experiences, I founded the Value Technology Foundation, a 501(c)(3) where I initially served as the CEO and also was the Chair of the Board. I am still Chairman, but also serve as the Director of Policy Innovation and Research covering the cryptocurrency industry where regulation and policy intersects with the world of digital assets and distributed ledger technology. I also do private consulting engagements for layer one distributed ledger technology protocols, digital asset technology companies, and financial institutions, with a focus on the intersection of compliance, regulation, governance and policy for digital assets offerings and guiding third-party crypto service providers on working with U.S. banks.
I am also grateful to serve as an advisor to the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) where I can formulate policies and ideas that can help the U.S. be the best place to hold Bitcoin.
My undergraduate degree is from Cornell University in Government (BA, 1997) and hold an MBA with a focus on accounting at the Kogod School of Business (MBA, 2009).