In November 2021, Odell Beckham Jr. signed with the Rams and announced he would take his $750,000 salary in bitcoin through a deal with Cash App. Bitcoin was trading around $64,000 at the time. Over the next twelve months it lost about 74% of its value. His income tax was still owed on $750,000. Bitcoin did recover, and by late 2024 Beckham was on X asking who had called the move dumb. That worked out for him. The lesson is that his paycheck turned into a long-term bet he hadn’t really chosen to place.
Trevor Lawrence’s case went differently. Days before the Jaguars took him first overall in April 2021, he signed with Blockfolio. The deal included a signing bonus paid entirely in crypto, spread across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana and held in his Blockfolio account. Blockfolio belonged to FTX, and FTX went bankrupt in November 2022. How much of that bonus Lawrence still held by then has never been made public.
Most people who get paid in crypto aren’t first-round picks. Around sports betting, though, there are plenty of them: handicappers selling pick packages, editors cutting betting podcasts, Discord moderators, affiliate partners, and anyone cashing out of a crypto sportsbook. People who take crypto month after month have mostly landed on one routine. They set prices in dollars, convert whatever arrives into a dollar-pegged stablecoin the day it lands, and write down what it was worth at that moment.
Who actually gets paid this way
Crypto pay is still uncommon, and most people who choose it choose dollars. Pantera Capital runs a pay survey of the crypto industry, with about 1,600 respondents in 77 countries. Its 2024 edition found 9.6% of respondents were paid in crypto, up from 3% in 2023. USDC made up 63% of those salaries and USDT another 28.6%.
A broader survey points the same way. In September and October 2025, YouGov polled 4,658 adults in 15 countries for BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure company. Everyone in the sample already held crypto or planned to, so this isn’t the general public. In that group, 39% said part of their income comes in stablecoins, and for them it made up about 35% of their yearly earnings.
When the person getting paid picks the token, they pick a stable one. The trouble starts when the client picks, and the client happens to hold something else.
A $2,000 pick package, three different values
Monero shows the problem well, because its 2026 has been anything but steady. XMR hit an all-time high of $797.73 on January 14. Say a handicapper sold a $2,000 season package that day and was paid in Monero. That came to about 2.51 XMR. Here’s what those coins were worth later if they stayed in the wallet.
| Date | XMR price | Value of 2.51 XMR |
| January 14, 2026 | $797.73 | $2,000 |
| Late June 2026 | about $310 | about $780 |
| October 7, 2026 | about $548 | about $1,370 |
January 14 is the worst possible payday, and it was picked on purpose. Someone paid in June would be well up by October. Either way, the result came down to the date. Bettors know the difference between a bet you chose and variance you got stuck with. An unconverted invoice is the second kind.
Meme coins are rougher still. Shiba Inu sits about 94% below its October 2021 peak and lost more than half its value in the twelve months to October 2026, according to CoinGecko. A March 2026 analysis of SHIB’s supply found more than 60% held in large wallets, with the price tracking the wider crypto market much more than anything the project itself does. You can handicap an NFL spread. You can’t handicap that.
None of this makes crypto a bad way to get paid. It moves money across borders fast and skips the bank. The coin a payment arrives in just usually isn’t the one you want to hold when rent is due.
Ask for stablecoins, and put it in writing
The cheapest fix happens before money moves. Price in dollars and name the coins you’ll accept. One line on an invoice covers it:
Amount due: USD 2,000. Payable in USDC (Ethereum or Solana) or by bank transfer. Other coins by prior agreement, valued at the USD market rate at the time of receipt.
Plenty of clients will send USDC once asked. Bettors have a similar option on the other side of the counter. Many crypto sportsbooks list USDT or USDC among their withdrawal methods, and picking one at cashout saves a conversion later.
Some people will still insist on paying in whatever they hold. That’s usually fine, as long as you know how you’ll get out of it.
Getting out of a coin the big exchanges won’t touch
With Bitcoin or Ether, it’s simple. Any large exchange will take the deposit and sell it for dollars or USDC the same day.
Monero is harder. Binance delisted it in February 2024. Kraken stopped offering it to customers in the European Economic Area that October. From July 2027, the EU’s anti-money-laundering regulation will bar licensed crypto providers from handling privacy coins.
Swap services fill that gap, and you don’t need an exchange account. You enter the address where you want to receive funds, send one coin, and the other lands in your own wallet. If you need to convert Monero to USD value quickly, a service such as ChangeNOW takes you to USDC, a dollar-pegged token, in a single swap. By ChangeNOW’s own estimate, XMR to USDC usually takes 5 to 30 minutes, most of it spent waiting for the Monero network to confirm the deposit. A fixed-rate mode locks the amount you’ll receive before you send anything, which helps when the number has to match an invoice.
Swaps aren’t free. The quoted rate usually includes the service’s margin and network fees, so compare what you’ll receive with the market price before confirming. Check the network too. USDC runs on Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon and others, and a transfer sent to an address on the wrong network can be lost. Pick the one your exchange or cash-out service supports.
What the tax office sees
Tax authorities value crypto income in their own currency on the day it arrives. In the US, the IRS treats digital assets received for services as ordinary income at their dollar fair market value when you receive them. For an independent contractor, that also counts as self-employment income. The same figure becomes the cost basis of the coins, and that’s where holding gets expensive. Sportsbook payouts fall under the gambling rules instead, but the IRS taxes those too, valued in dollars.
Swap the coins on arrival and the gain or loss on the swap is a few dollars either way. Hold them and the later sale is a separate taxable event. Back to the January Monero payment: the handicapper reports $2,000 of income. Selling in June for $780 creates a $1,220 loss, but it’s a capital loss. It’s reported separately and doesn’t reduce the $2,000 of self-employment income already on the books.
HMRC in the UK starts from the same place, using the sterling value on the date of receipt. Other countries have their own versions, and none of this is tax advice. The records look the same nearly everywhere: for each payment, keep the date, the coin, the amount, its value in your home currency at that moment, and the transaction ID.
How far to trust the stable part
A dollar stablecoin is a claim on a private company’s reserves, and USDC has wobbled once. In March 2023, its issuer Circle disclosed that $3.3 billion of the roughly $40 billion backing the coin sat at Silicon Valley Bank, which had just failed. USDC dropped to about 88 cents over the weekend and was back near a dollar by Monday, after the US government said the bank’s depositors would be covered.
Rules have tightened since. The GENIUS Act, signed in the US on July 18, 2025, requires payment stablecoins to be backed one-to-one by reserves and makes issuers publish monthly disclosures. It takes full effect no later than January 18, 2027.
A sensible habit: keep in stablecoins only what you’ll spend or cash out within a few weeks, and move the rest to a bank. If you want crypto as an investment, buy it on purpose with money set aside for it. Beckham at least made his call out loud. Don’t let a pile of unconverted invoices make it for you.
A checklist for each payment
- Invoice in dollars and list the coins and networks you accept.
- When the payment lands, record the date, the amount and its dollar value before doing anything else.
- Convert to a dollar stablecoin the same day, using a route you’ve already tested with a small amount.
- File the transaction IDs for the payment and the swap with the invoice.
- Once a month, send whatever you won’t need in stablecoins to your bank.
