The case of the Riot Blockchain executive compensation vote has caught the attention of the financial industry.
According to figures published on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website documents of bitcoin mining company Riot Blockchain, the organization’s shareholders voted in favor of most of management’s proposals in late July, but rejected the Board’s recommendation to pay more than $90 million to Riot Blockchain’s five managers.
As noted by the New York investment company VanEck, which is one of the shareholders of Riot Blockchain, the overall level of salaries of top managers in the U.S. mining companies markedly exceeds what is paid to managers at other organizations in this country, and that is why there is no need to allocate an additional $90 million for bonuses for managers of Riot Blockchain.
Note that Riot Blockchain is currently capitalized at about $1 billion, and its shareholders include the largest investment fund in the world, BlackrockVanguard and Mirae Asset Global Investments, as well as Morgan Stanley Bank.
VanEck took salary levels at companies in the country’s energy and IT sectors as a comparison. It turned out that, on average, mining companies in the U.S. have a payroll of $10.8 million for managers’ salaries, which is 3.9 times higher than in companies in the IT segment. VanEck believes that the level of payments to managers in the mining business should correlate with the use of “green energy” to mine the number one cryptocurrency.