Since this summer, the CityCoins project has started issuing MiamiCoin, with 30% of the returns going directly into a wallet owned by the city of Miami in Florida. The amount of money collected since then is so important, that the city council is considering giving it back in part to its citizens.
Will MiamiCoin bring Bitcoin to the people of Miami?
The protocol around MiamiCoin, proposed by the CityCoins teams, has already managed to generate more than $21.3 million for the city of Miami in less than 3 months.
In an interview with CoinDesk TV, Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, explained that he plans to share this financial windfall with his citizens:
“We are going to be the very first American city to give returns on Bitcoin, in the form of dividends paid directly to its residents.”.
Indeed, to mine (create) MiamiCoin, protocol participants must wager STX tokens, the native crypto of the Stacks blockchain – a second-layer solution to the Bitcoin network.
While 70% of these STXs go back to the MiamiCoin owners, 30% end up directly in the city’s pockets, via its municipal wallet. Now the STX earned in this way can also be staked, this time to earn staking rewards in BTC.
“[Will these bitcoin dividends] be paid out, for example, to all taxpayers? Or will it be all the people who vote in the city? Or the people who have an address in the city? [This distribution] is going to be a challenge to do.”
Francis Suarez, Mayor of Miami
A mayor of Miami always so crypto-enthusiastic
Because the goal of the maneuver for Francis Suarez is indeed to make more of his fellow citizens aware of Bitcoin, and even to get them to use/spend these BTC:
“I see a world very quickly where the system created by Satoshi [Nakamoto] will be used to make everyday payments, and we need to make that jump. (…) We need people to understand that Bitcoin is growing in value (…) we want you to hold Bitcoins. But at the same time, we need to increase the utility of Bitcoin… We’re going to create digital wallets for our residents… And we’re going to give them Bitcoins directly from the returns from [the MiamiCoin protocol].
If the returns continue at this rate, the mayor even explains that they could end up completely covering the city’s fiscal needs, which sounds pretty incredible! In the meantime, Francis Suarez is considering it quite possible to allow his constituents to pay their taxes in BTC.
When we see the unexpected success of MiamiCoin, we understand that other cities want to follow this path paved with gold. For example, the newly elected mayor of New York, Eric Adams, has just congratulated the launch of NYCCoin, powered by the same CityCoins team.
