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

By Andrew Couts Published October 28, 2020

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.’”

Recommended Videos

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]

Former Staff Writer

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

Topics

Cars

The Apple Car may be dead, but it became the foundation of Apple Intelligence

A decade of work on a canceled car project reportedly laid the groundwork for Apple Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence in Apple Car

The Apple Car may have never left the garage, but it apparently gave birth to Apple's AI ambitions. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's canceled autonomous vehicle project, one that consumed more than a decade of work and over $10 billion before being scrapped in 2024, ended up laying the technological foundation for Apple Intelligence. In a rather ironic twist, one of Apple's most expensive failures may also become one of its most important long-term investments.

The Apple Car forced Apple to think like an AI company

Emerging Tech

Researchers hid a prompt injection inside a PNG, and AI fell for it

Hacker

AI coding assistants like Claude are becoming every developer's favorite coworker. They can review code, explain confusing functions, and even write entire features with a single prompt. But new research suggests that this growing trust could also become their biggest weakness.

A team of security researchers (professor Sudipta Chattopadhyay and researcher Murali Ediga) has demonstrated an unusual attack that doesn't target the AI model directly. Instead, it targets what the AI doesn't pay enough attention to during code reviews. Rather than hiding malicious instructions in lines of code, the researchers tucked them inside an image file. Since many AI review tools treat images as decorative assets rather than as something worth inspecting, the pull request can appear perfectly harmless and sail through the review.

Emerging Tech

AI has already fallen into the wrong hands and they’re using it to make bombs

Artificial intelligence has quickly become the go-to tool for everything from writing emails and summarizing meetings to helping students study or developers debug code. But the same technology that saves people time can also be misused, and a new report suggests that terrorist organizations are finding ways to do exactly that.

According to a research paper shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication, researchers found evidence that members of Boko Haram have been using popular AI chatbots to support both day-to-day activities and combat-related tasks. Interviews with 27 former members conducted in Nigeria over the past two years suggest that tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek were used to gather technical information, troubleshoot weapons, and even assist with planning attacks.