MiamiCoin and Co.: What do City Coins bring?
3 min readMiami Mayor Francis Suarez keeps emphasizing that the city is the crypto capital of the world. Reasons for this are the settlement of companies like eToro and Blockchain.com in Miami, moving the BTC Conference to the city and also launching the MiamiCoin as one of the project’s four tokens so far, named: City Coins. But what do these coins actually do?
City Coin number 1: What is the MiamiCoin?
Miami Coin ($MIA) is the first City Coin on the market and has been tradable since June 2021. MIA is a token based on the Stacks protocol.
MiamiCoin and the other City Coins can be mined or purchased by individuals who want to support their favorite city while earning crypto returns. City Coins provide an ongoing source of crypto revenue for the city. Similar to taxpayers’ money, the proceeds from the project are in turn intended to benefit the city’s citizens in the form of new public spaces, infrastructure, city events and startup recruitment. If MiamiCoin’s growth continues, proponents of the technology say, it would lead to a future where the entire city budget would be covered by MIA. Miami would then be the first US metropolis to do entirely without taxes.
In addition to the MiamiCoin, there are already coins for the cities of New York and Austin, Texas, as more and more cities are recognizing the potential of the technology for themselves. If you want a City Coin for your favorite American city, you can here cast your vote for it.
How exactly do the City Coins work?
The project CityCoins is powered by the Stacks protocol, which enables Smart Contacts to run on the BTC network for the first time. It all works like this:
By routing STX tokens into the smart contract of a specific block of the Stacks blockchain, miners can mine the City Coins. The STX token is the native token of the Stacks network. The miners compete for the City Coins with the submitted STX tokens. There is only one winner per block who can then claim the City Coin reward. All STX submitted for mining will then be redistributed:
70 percent of mining rewards are paid to the people who stake their City Coins.
30 percent go to the wallet set up in the respective city. This is where the money is collected, which will later flow into the expansion and improvement of the city. The city can convert their STX from the wallet to US dollars whenever they want or they can stake the STX tokens to earn BTC.
The most popular site for mining or staking City Coins is minecitycoins.com.
CityCoins planned in 15 cities
Fifteen other cities are set to receive CityCoins, including three in the US and 12 others in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Berlin, Lagos, Cairo, Dubai, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo and Sydney.
City Coins: Use for the cities
City Coins can be held or staked after successful mining to earn more STX. BTC can also be earned by staking STX. City Coins can also be borrowed and lent.
The Stacks Network is open source and offers developers a new way to build applications and experiment with innovative use cases. Open source projects that benefit the city are particularly welcome here.
The FAQ on the CityCoins website states:
The CityCoins community will develop apps using the tokens for rewards, local benefits, access control (to digital or physical spaces), commerce, lending, smart contract execution and much more.
FAQ CityCoins website
