Suarez, a Republican who embraced the cryptos during the pandemic, has come out ahead by loudly marketing the Magic City as a more business-friendly alternative to Silicon Valley, cheering on, for instance, a crypto exchange to win the naming rights for the Miami Heat’s arena.
“NYC is going to be the center of the cryptocurrency industry and other fast-growing, innovative industries! Just wait!” Of course, there were jokes about the whole thing, even though Adams’s cheerleading for crypto and tech jobs could be hugely impactful in the city’s economic recovery coming out of the pandemic.
“They have to take the dollars that are issued from the budget for his salary and now convert it into virtual currency.” On the question of how the city could go about converting dollars into digital currency, the Department of Finance didn’t return an email seeking clarification, the comptroller’s office said I should talk to the Office of Payroll Administration — a department it helps oversee — and that department said I should reach out the current mayor’s office, which didn’t get back to me.
Working directly with municipalities can be a complicated process due to government contracting and transparency rules, which sometimes specify that, in order to win a request for a proposal, a business must have been operating for a certain number of years or have already worked with the government, Chester said.
There was no word on whether Adams already owns bitcoin — for what it’s worth, there’s no mention of it in his 2020 public disclosures — or if he wants to make it more widely available to city employees.