New York’s new mayor, Eric Adams, has said he is looking forward to receiving his salary in Bitcoin.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams says he hasn’t received his first check yet, but he still plans to take his first 3 paychecks in bitcoin. “I’m looking forward to that first paycheck in bitcoin,” he tells @andrewrsorkin. pic.twitter.com/dE3vWaxW1D
— CNBC (@CNBC) January 6, 2022
The Bitcoin projects of the mayor of New York
He has not yet received a salary, partly because he only took office on 1 January 2022, but said he plans to have his first three salaries paid in Bitcoin.
Adams, interviewed by CNBC, also stated that sometimes the best time to buy is when things go wrong, so that he can eventually make a good profit if the prices then go back up. He also stated that New York City needs to use new technologies such as blockchain and Bitcoin.
The new mayor, who was elected in November, had already expressed explicitly during the election campaign his intention to turn New York into the new centre of these new technologies.
He declared this publicly as early as June, five months before the elections took place, and when he was still participating in the Democratic Party primaries.
New York vs Miami
New York has long been recognized globally as the financial centre of the world, but in recent years it was having its position as the US centre of the crypto markets taken away by Silicon Valley and, more importantly, Miami.
To be fair, Miami is still the single US city furthest along in building a real local (and global) community to support cryptocurrencies, but with Adams as mayor, New York is definitely a candidate to become the true world centre of crypto markets.
The mayor of New York does not have the authority to legislate, either at the state or federal level, and unclear regulations are probably the biggest limitation to the spread of crypto markets, particularly in the US.
But like Miami’s mayor Francis Suarez, New York’s mayor can at least encourage economic, social and cultural initiatives to develop a strong crypto community in the financial centre of the world, which is currently apparently absent or not particularly active.
New York’s pro-Bitcoin prospects
Since 2020, the NYSE in particular has started to offer crypto products through its parent company (ICE, InterContinental Exchange), after the Chicago exchange was the first to do so in the US in 2017.
So New York, although it may seem to be lagging behind in this respect, is now catching up very quickly, and with the new pro-Bitcoin mayor it could make a real leap forward in this respect.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/01/10/mayor-new-york-wages-in-bitcoin/