New York Mayor Eric Adams: I Will Take First Three Paychecks in Bitcoin

With this news, Adams joins Miami Mayor Francis Suarez who said Tuesday he will take his next paycheck in bitcoin.

share

key takeaways

  • While New York is synonymous with being the headquarters of TradFi, it has some competition in the era of digital assets
  • To show how serious he is about attracting blockchain and crypto companies to New York, newly elected mayor Eric Adams pledged to take his first three paychecks in bitcoin

Newly elected New York City Mayor Eric Adams said that he will take his first three paychecks in bitcoin. Adams thought he was going one step further than Miami Mayor Francisco Suarez who said Tuesday that he would take only his next paycheck in bitcoin.

Loading Tweet..

But just hours after Adams made his announcement, Mayor Suarez told Fox News that he would take his entire paycheck in bitcoin.

Both mayors were responding to a call from podcaster and investor at Morgan Creek Capital Management, Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano who challenged politicians across the country to take their paychecks in bitcoin.

Suarez has been touting the pro-bitcoin party line since February when he announced plans to pay city workers in the number-one cryptocurrency. He also plans to allow city residents to pay city fees and even their taxes in bitcoin if the city council agrees to his plan.

Miami was the home of the Bitcoin 2021 event, and the first city in the US to have its own CityCoin, It’s also home to the FTX Arena, which inked a 19-year deal in March to take over naming rights of National Basketball Association team Miami Heat’s stadium, formerly known as American Airlines Arena.

For his part, Adams has pledged to make New York more friendly to businesses, specifically startups, some of which moved away from the city citing high costs as Covid-19 normalized remote work.

“We’re too bureaucratic, too expensive, and too difficult to do business,” Adams said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Our agencies — they go into businesses and are looking for ways to penalize or fine them. We’re changing that atmosphere altogether.” 

But up against Adams’ quest to make New York, the city, more crypto-friendly, is New York, the state, which has taken a hard line in regulating the industry. 

Recently, New York Attorney General Letitia James ordered an end to crypto lending protocols in the state, sending requests for information to Nexo and Celsius. The state’s BitLicense framework, once heralded as the first comprehensive money transmitter license for crypto companies, has been criticized as archaic and restrictive and incompatible with the DeFi era.

Prior to winning New York’s mayoral election, Adams’ was the borough president of Brooklyn which has seen a 356% increase in tech startups call the area home, including Blockworks, over the last decade.

This story was updated on November 4, 2021, at 7:31 pm ET.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Hilton Metropole | 225 Edgware Rd, London

MON - WED, MARCH 18 - 20, 2024

Crypto’s premier institutional conference returns to London in March 2024. The DAS: London Experience:  Attend expert-led panel discussions and fireside chats  Hear the latest developments regarding the crypto and digital asset regulatory environment directly from policymakers and experts   Grow your network […]

Salt Lake City, UT

WED - FRI, OCTOBER 9 - 11, 2024

Pack your bags, anon — we’re heading west! Join us in the beautiful Salt Lake City for the third installment of Permissionless. Come for the alpha, stay for the fresh air. Permissionless III promises unforgettable panels, killer networking opportunities, and mountains […]

recent research

logo.jpeg

Research

Akash is a general-purpose compute platform with GPUs, storage, LLM training or inference, and validator hosting through its two-sided marketplace.

article-image

Public mining companies have committed about $750 million to buy machines in the last couple months, BlocksBridge Consulting data shows

article-image

Sponsored

Whether real estate, diamonds or energy, crypto has an abundance of opportunities ahead of it through RWA tokenization

article-image

Block’s self-custody bitcoin wallet uses three keys to secure bitcoin

article-image

Montenegro plans to extradite Do Kwon to the US over South Korea, the Wall Street Journal reports

article-image

In the rare cases when fraud is punished — like the Sam Bankman-Fried trial — we should feel no guilt for doing so to the full extent

article-image

A new Reuters report claims that applicants and the SEC continue to work out spot bitcoin ETF details