World’s first bitcoin-exclusive employee

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Olaf Carlson-Wee is no stranger to Bitcoin. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on the cryptocurrency. At the time, nearly no academic research existed on the subject. When he first started out with crypto, he invested US$700 in Bitcoin at the high price of US$16 each. It later dropped down to US$2.

But Carlson-Wee knew a good thing when he saw it. After living in a yurt in a commune, he emailed Bitcoin exchange Coinbase and become its first employee. He was also the first employee at the company – and possibly the world – to receive his full salary in Bitcoin. Coinbase has since become the most popular US-based Bitcoin exchange.

Sadly, he failed to negotiate his monthly paycheck at a fixed amount of Bitcoin. Instead, he received a dollar-denominated salary of US$50,000 that is converted to Bitcoin at the time of payment. However, this has been for the best. For the company’s sake, at least. When he took on the role, 1 bitcoin equalled around US$20-US$30. Today, it’s at US$6.755. Coinbase would highly likely have been driven into bankruptcy.

While at Coinbase, he famously rolled out a “Bitcoin SAT” for new hires. (The exchange only hired additional people once it hit 250,000 users.) This was due to the technical nature of the job. All 8 of the applicants that made the cut received their salaries in Bitcoin. His contributions to the exchange didn’t end there. After a promotion to head of risk, he managed to lower Coinbase’ fraud rate by 75 percent thanks to AI algorithms he implemented.

Carlson-Wee is the son of Lutheran pastors and was studying sociology when he first learned about Bitcoin. His two brothers became poets, and he has moved on from managing Coinbase’ customer care division to managing crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital, now worth in excess of US$200 million in the span of 10 months.