Soccer team to pay players in cryptocurrency

The team will be Europe’s first to be paid in cryptocurrency

Gibraltar United, a European football team in the premier division, plans to be the first to pay its players in cryptocurrency from next season.

The club’s owner, Pablo Dana, is an early investor in Quantocoin (QTC) and has launched a club sponsorship to incorporate payment agreements in cryptocurrency for all player contracts by next season.

Dana told The Guardian newspaper that Gibraltar offers the perfect environment for the initiative: “It was the first to regulate betting companies 20 years back, when everyone was seeing them as horrible. They put compliance and anti-money laundering [AML] regulations and created a platform – they have the intelligence to do the same with cryptocurrencies.”

Advantages of crypto

QTC is a decentralised payment platform built on the Waves blockchain and Dana believes that introducing crypto to the sport could mitigate corruption and provide greater transparency.

Crypto payments also enable small football clubs and semi-professional teams to pay foreign recruits who may experience problems in setting up financial services when moving abroad.

Gibraltar’s financial sector has been among the first to embrace blockchain. In January, the government introduced regulations for businesses using the technology and also plans to introduce a regulatory framework for initial coin offerings (ICOs).