Paid In Bitcoin
Happy to announce we paid out in Bitcoin!
Over the summer, we made an announcement that we would be accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for our production services. The news was met with a lot of curiosity from our clients, partners and vendors. We made the decision to publicly announce Bitcoin acceptance after a couple of projects had opted to pay with it earlier on. We were very excited.
Then, in November, we made the announcement that we’d start issuing payment in Bitcoin to our employees, contractors and vendors who wanted to accept it as their payment.
Today, we’re happy to share the news of our first payments made to those individuals using Bitcoin.
Our experience
The process is very straightforward. Exchanged dollars for bitcoin, then store it in a wallet. In our case, it’s using an institutional custodian for our holdings via multi-signatures, then the payments were sent out to the payee’s bitcoin wallet directly. Some opted for on-chain (meaning the original 10+ minutes of bitcoin processing) and others opted for Lightning payments (Lightning Network is a second layer solution to make payments faster with incredibly small fees).
The overall process was faster and more secure than a bank-to-bank transfer or a PayPal payment.
To manage the volatility
We made it a plan to make regular weekly exchanges (known as dollar cost averaging) in order to take advantages of dips in market price. Some weeks we bought more bitcoin, other weeks less, and while the dollar price may fluctuate, because you’re making regular exchanges, you’re managing the risk more effectively than exchanging everything all at once.
Future plans
We’re going to continue with this program throughout December and into the first quarter of 2022. We will also continue to maintain and grow our Bitcoin holdings on the balance sheet indefinitely.
Our short film, ATOM, will have its production budget priced in Bitcoin.
Starting in January, we’ll have prices for our services available in Bitcoin as well.
These are very exciting times for us as we continue to venture into the crypto space. We’re also happy to continue to be one of the first independent animation studios to continue to explore and innovate in the crypto space with the goal of helping to transform the way our industry conducts business all across the board.
