NEW YORK – The Women’s National Basketball Association has announced they’re in the process of developing their own currency, or scrip, to help provide additional income to their athletes, putting them on par financially with their male counterparts.

When the Indiana Fever drafted Caitlin Clark with the number one draft pick in the 2024 WNBA draft with a 4-year rookie contract worth $338,056, many people were quick to the comment section to make their outrage heard over the staggering pay gap between female and male basketball players. Especially after it was learned that the San Antonio Spur’s 2023 draft pick, Victor Wembanyama, is set to earn more than $55 million over the same time frame.

“Women have been fighting an uphill battle for equal pay since the early 1960’s,” said Deborah Smith, a spokeswomen for the WNBA. “We’re hoping this new scrip initiative will help level the playing field for our athletes by providing them the millions of dollars they deserve.”

This new currency, dubbed Basketbucks, will feature tender in increments similar to the U.S. dollar, worth one, two, five, ten, twenty, and one hundred Basketbucks. The league intends to restructure its players contracts prior to the 2024 season with top-tier players like Diana Taurasi and Breanna Stewart, among others, earning up-to 50 million Basketbucks annually with incentive options to earn more.

To help legitimize the currency, the Basketbuck will be tied to a blockchain similar to Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Until then, however, the WNBA will establish company stores within the stadiums for the players to spend their hard-earned pseudo-cash on things like toiletries, gossip magazines, and groceries. In the future, the league is hoping to bring in more high-ticket inventory to the stores like designer clothes, jewelry, and professional kitchen appliances.

Each player will also receive a unique NFT in their likeness to celebrate the launch of the currency.

Critics of the WNBA’s decision to pay their players with a scrip is in complete violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and doesn’t help fix the organization’s cashflow problem.

“Company scrip made sense in the 19th century when banks and money were hard to come by in rural areas, but they essentially make employees slaves to the company as they’re forced to reinvest their earnings back into the company that paid them,” said Jack Delaware, an investment banker and self-described cryptocurrency fanatic. “If the WNBA wants to pay its players more, they need to make more money. It’s as simple as that.”

Of course, making more money isn’t as simple as it sounds. In 2023, the WNBA brought in about $60 million across the entire league. Of that, about $13 million went to the players in accordance with the player union’s bargaining agreement. In contrast, the NBA brought in more than $10 billion in revenue over the same time span. So, while it’s a nice notion to pay the women as much as the men, the simple fact is the league’s revenue doesn’t support those kinds of contracts, especially since the women’s league has been operating at a loss of about $10 million a year since its inception in 1996.

It’s not all doom and gloom for female basketball players, however. One of the league’s primary sources of income comes from ad revenue and ticket sales. In 2023, the average viewership of a WNBA game was about 500,000, a steep increase from 2022 which had an average of about 379,000 viewers. And, with Caitlin Clark’s historic last NCAA season, which featured the most watched women’s college basketball game in history (with 12.3 million viewers), it’s probably a safe assumption that her entry into the professional basketball league will see those numbers (and their pay) continue to soar.

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