Want your paycheck in Bitcoin? Get paid with the BitPay Payroll API

By Andrew Couts Updated October 28, 2020

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Are you bonkers for Bitcoin? If so, then you may want to talk your employer into using the new Bitcoin Payroll API from leading digital currency payment processor BitPay, which allows businesses to pay all or a portion of workers’ salaries in the cryptocurrency.

While getting paid entirely in Bitcoin is likely a bad idea for most people – the price fluctuates too wildly, and too few businesses accept it as payment for it to be practical – this could be a good way for anyone looking for a relatively easy way to get into Bitcoin. As BitPay co-founder and CEO Tony Gallippi said in a statement, “For the longest time the hard question was ‘How do I buy bitcoin?’ Now the answer is easy: ‘Ask your employer.’”

To test out the Bitcoin Payroll API, BitPay recruited its own employees to take at least a portion of their salaries in virtual money. According to the company, 100 percent of BitPay’s 20 full-time staffers are now using the API each paycheck. In addition to ensuring that using the Payroll API delivers employees with their dues in Bitcoin, BitPay’s internal tests also solved the issue of properly paying taxes, according to Gallippi.

“Since all payroll and withholding taxes are taken out first from the employee’s gross income, bitcoins can be sent from the net pay tax-free, and the employer’s gross income reporting to the IRS remains unchanged,” Gallippi said.

As mentioned, the exchange rate for Bitcoin often takes major jumps and dives, sometimes by the minute. So $100 worth of Bitcoin one paycheck might be – almost certainly will be – completely different the next time around. If you’re optimistic about Bitcoin, that’s actually a good thing – if you’re paid 1 BTC in place of $800 from your paycheck one week, the next month that same 1 BTC might be worth twice as much. Or, you know, it could be worth $12.

Despite the volatility of digital currencies, this is definitely an interesting experiment. If you manage to convince your employer to pay you in Bitcoin, let us know how it goes, would you?

[Image via aslysun/Shutterstock]

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…

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