GMO Internet to pay employees in Bitcoin as it prepares to enter mining business

Company perks can come in strange forms in the world of tech.

But beer Fridays, office dogs and football tables all look pretty tame compared to one Japanese company’s offer to pay its staff in Bitcoin.

GMO Internet, which has a Bitcoin trading and exchange business, will pay participating employees up to 100,000 yen, or £600 worth of their monthly salary in Bitcoin.

With Bitcoin currently trading at more than $17,500 after surging from just $1,000 at the beginning of this year, GMO employees could be in for a windfall from their paycheck.

But many in the financial community are concerned that Bitcon’s value is little more than a bubble. More than 82 per cent of UK institutional investors think the bubble will burst, so that could mean the employees end up losing their pay in the cryptocurrency.

Read more: Andrew Bailey: Bitcoin investors should be prepared to lose all their money

The purpose is not just to reward employees with a potential goldmine of cryptocurrency, but to actually help the company with its operations through the experiment.

“We hope to improve our own literacy of virtual currency by actually using it,” a spokesperson said.

This is ahead of the company’s entry into Bitcoin “mining” next month. That’s the process of adding transaction records to bitcoin’s public ledger, or the blockchain. You can read more about it in our handy explainer.

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