Miami Mayor Is Still Receiving Bitcoin Paychecks, Says His Salary ‘Is Actually Up’ Despite Ongoing Crypto Winter

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez says he’s still receiving his paychecks in Bitcoin (BTC) despite the king crypto’s precipitous fall from all-time highs.

Suarez tells CNBC in a new interview that his BTC salary has “been a good investment.”

“You have to understand that I get paid every two weeks. So it’s not like I bought it all at [$60,000] and now it’s at [$20,000], so sometimes people misunderstand that you’re buying it every two weeks or you’re buying it in the fluctuations, so actually, since I bought it, or since I started taking my salary in Bitcoin, my salary’s actually up. So it’s actually been a good investment. Not that I’m trading on it.”

The Miami mayor first started accepting Bitcoin paychecks in late 2021.

In his recent CNBC interview, Suarez was also asked about his decision earlier this year to embrace the US arm of the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX. FTX.US announced in September that it was moving its headquarters from Chicago to Miami, a month and a half before it imploded.

The Miami mayor says he wishes FTX would have been more responsible with their customers’ money. He thinks part of the responsibility is a failure on the part of governments to regulate crypto firms “properly in a way that would put guardrails on what they could do with customers’ money.”

“Well I think everybody who invested in FTX wishes that they had clarity as to what was going on, certainly behind the scenes. I think some of the smartest people in the investment world that were on their cap table and did, presumably, extensive due diligence and have more sophisticated due diligence tools than we have, were duped. And you know when someone’s doing things that are fraudulent, it’s very difficult to detect that in the absence of that knowledge.”

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