The mayor of Miami, Florida is spotlighting the city’s very own cryptocurrency. The new digital asset is designed to generate millions of dollars for the city’s economy – if people embrace it.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez appeared on Fox Business to discuss the city’s plans for its cryptocurrency, which was officially announced in June. Dubbed “MiamiCoin” ($MIA), the city’s token will be used to fund the development of Miami as well as encourage people to move to Miami, which is currently home to roughly 454,279 residents.
The value proposition for residents is that token holders and city governments can earn crypto rewards while supporting the city.
MiamiCoin is built on the CityCoin platform. A user will be able to mine MiamiCoin, borrow it, lend it, and even program it. Token holders can also earn a Bitcoin yield.
Per CityCoin’s website,
“The possibilities of CityCoins become endless as cities one by one begin to #pickupthebag and communities and software develop around their respective CityCoins. CityCoins communities will create apps that use tokens for rewards, local benefits, access control (to digital or physical spaces), trading, lending, smart contract execution, and more. As one simple example, local businesses can provide discounts or benefits to people who show they ‘Stack for their city’ by Stacking their CityCoins.”
MiamiCoin is the first CityCoin.
According to Mayor Suarez,
“What the city gets out of it is a percentage of the coins that are mined are actually donated to the city of Miami by the virtue of its protocol. So the city of Miami could end up earning millions of dollars as a result of the popularity of MiamiCoin, because obviously Miami has now become, and we’ve talked about this many times on your program, the Bitcoin capital of the world.
We’re focusing on differentiating our economy by creating the new wave of technological products that will incentivize people to move to Miami and be a part of our tech ecosystem.”
Suarez adds that MiamiCoin could help raise funds for the city to combat problems like homelessness and bolster law enforcement.
“So whenever [MiamiCoin] is mined, a percentage of the coin, by virtue of the programming, goes to the city of Miami – it’s actually 30% of what’s mined. Seventy percent will actually go to the miners.
So what happens is that Miami will benefit from the use of the MiamiCoin, and from the branding that is associated with it. That will go directly into our general fund, so we can use that to continue to alleviate homelessness.
We’re a big city that’s trying to eliminate homelessness completely. We can focus on obviously policing and increasing our police force, which is something we’ve done, and we can focus on a variety of other things that our city does very, very well to increase our quality of life for our residents.”
Throughout 2021, Francis Suarez has remained a steadfast supporter of blockchain and cryptocurrency adoption. His announcement of MiamiCoin comes just six months after sharing his ambitious plans to convert Miami into the center of crypto development as well as potentially adding Bitcoin to the city’s treasury.
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