ZAVOD-IT

Protection against inflation and a bonus for millennials: who and where pays their salaries in cryptocurrency

In early April, it became known about the Ekaterinburg-based IT company Zavod-IT, which offered its employees to receive their salaries in cryptocurrency - bitcoins, ethers, USDT or XRP - if they wished. In a comment to Forbes, the company's founder Alexander Protsyuk explained that he made this decision to protect employees working in different countries from the problems associated with the fall of the ruble and the withdrawal of Visa and Mastercard from Russia. In addition to Russia, the company has employees in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the United States, Thailand and Ukraine. “For a programmer to work well, he should be given the opportunity to write code and not think about anything else: neither about geopolitics, nor about ways to get money into his account, nor about the ruble exchange rate,” says Protsyuk. 

According to him, at the moment when Visa and Mastercard cards of Russian banks stopped working abroad, he himself was in Thailand and personally faced the problem: “The Tinkoff card turned from a payment instrument into a piece of plastic, and exchange offices stopped buying rubles. Cryptocurrency saved the day. It became not even an alternative, but the only way to use money in any way. Whereas before it was a high-tech tool for geeks, now it is practically the only way to transfer money across borders. As a result, I started withdrawing the accumulated cryptocurrency for everyday expenses and offered my employees to receive their salaries immediately in digital currency.” Protsyuk says that 30% of employees immediately switched to the new form, then this number increased, moreover, after learning about this opportunity from the media, other specialists began to come to him, willing to work in his company for crypto-salary.  

As for bitcoin rate hikes, in this case, Zavod-IT recommended his employees to immediately exchange the part of their salary that they need for expenses into local currencies, and keep the rest as an investment. “Over time, when payments are repeated from month to month at different cryptocurrency values, the value of the coins averages out, giving a good opportunity to make money when the exchange rate goes up,” Protsyuk hopes. 

“The lack of regulations for working with cryptocurrency in Russia is a disadvantage, but we don't have time to wait for lawmakers when there is such a powerful outflow of engineers from the country,” says Alexander Protsyuk. - We need to save what we have, make new offers to job seekers, show creativity, and the laws will adjust to the market. Many countries have already learned how to work with cryptocurrency, so Russia will follow them at some point”.