Skip to main content

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

bitcoin payroll api bitpay funny dude
Image used with permission by copyright holder

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]

Editors' Recommendations

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more