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by splix 128 days ago
I'm curious why you can't legally pay in crypto? I heard a few times about companies paying in crypto to their remote workers. In fact I heard that a US company was paying in BTC withing the US, though I'm not sure I trust this particular story. I also see that Deel accepts USDC, and to my understanding they convert to local currency of the remote worker. Is that all illegal? Truly want to understand.
2 comments
ghc 127 days ago
It's not illegal, but you have to do all the paperwork the same as if you pay in USD. That means tax withholdings and all that, on a per-pay-period basis. Doing this basically means going through a payroll provider. When I had an employee we paid in BTC, we had to go through a licensed company to actually do the BTC payment to our overseas worker (Circle).

The way it worked was our payroll provider would release the paycheck in USD to Circle, who would do conversion to BTC at prevailing exchange rates same day before executing the transfer.

If we already had the money in BTC, we would have had to convert the money to USD to send to our payroll provider so they could do withholdings and all that, and then have Circle convert it back to make the transfer.

There are foreign transfer reporting requirements and rules about currency conversion at payment time so that you can't skirt paying taxes. If you try to do it yourself you're making a lot of extra work for yourself.

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nailer 127 days ago
> Startups can't legally pay their employees in crypto

...

> It's not illegal

Why did you write that it was?

> you have to do all the paperwork the same as if you pay in USD

Yes. Obviously.

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ghc 126 days ago
> Why did you write that it was?

You misread. You can't legally pay through transfers (between wallets). You need an intermediary that verifies identity linked to wallets and does escrow to satisfy anti-fraud requirements.

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wmf 128 days ago
It's probably legal as long as you do all the same accounting/withholding that you would normally do. I suspect some companies are forgetting to do that, just as many people forget to report taxes on crypto.
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