Crypto Fast-Food
Switzerland’s City of Lugano Adopts BTC
Ukraine Raises 40 Million in CryptoCurrency
Twitter Memes of the Week
Crypto Fast-Food 🍟
🤑 Raoul Pal — former Goldman Sacks derivatives trader — has moved 100% of his liquid money into crypto
📈 16% of Americans now own crypto
Soulja Boy, Jake Paul, & Lil Yachty have a lawsuit against them for shilling Safemoon Coin
🐀 SEC (Gary Gensler) is taking aim at NFTs as possible “securities”
🍎 NYC Mayor, Eric Adams, is gunning to make the Big Apple the new center of crypto innovation. After arriving late to the party, $6.5 billion (nearly 50% of all crypto fundraising) has been invested in crypto start-ups since 2021.
Switzerland’s City of Lugano Adopts BTC
Switzerland's ninth-largest city, Lugano — a mostly Italian-speaking region with a population just north of 60,000 — is taking a page out of the El Salvadorian playbook.
Bitcoin will soon become a form of legal tender within the city.
Although the official currency will remain the Swiss Franc, Bitcoin and its’ lightning network will be allowed for such things as:
micro-payments
groceries
taxes
B2B business transactions
P2P remittences.
Lugano joins the ranks of a growing list of crypto-sanctuary zones; places like: Wyoming, Florida, Texas, and Colorado (in the US); El Salvador, Argentina (in S. America), Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania (in Africa), India, Pakistan… the list goes on!
StartUp Cities
🤔 Why is this important?
This is important because we are starting to see a tech diaspora from places like Silicone Valley & San Francisco to Crypto Sanctuary Cities.
As former Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, wrote in a recent article,
“You don't need to be at Stanford to stream Coursera, don't need to be on Sand Hill to raise VC, don't need to be in San Francisco anymore to do enterprise sales […] The tech diaspora is now fully mobile and [we] can use the internet to coordinate a real-world migration.”
To illustrate the point, Miami’s Mayor Francis Suarez has demonstrated the era of StartUp Cities have arrived full stop.
How?
After unabashedly posting the Bitcoin White Paper on his city’s website — a sort of “Bat” signal to attract top talent — Suarez was able to quickly create the first ever, crypto city-coin — MiamiCoin (ticker MIA) — which… has now generated $21 million dollars of additional revenue for the city.
It is obvious to many tech founders that Francis Suarez has kicked off a new movement, one that many are now calling “CEO of the City.”
This is important because Miami, and smaller cities like Lugano, are coming to the realization that we are in an international competition to attract cloud capitalists in order to be the first to hit pay dirt on this digital gold rush.
Expect more StartUp Cities to adopt The Suarez playbook.
Ukraine Raises Nearly $60 Million in CryptoCurrency
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 26th, more than 118,000 unique, digital wallets have shown up in support of the Ukrainian government, donating a nearly $60 million in crypto in under two weeks.
While the majority of crypto donations came from Ethereum and Bitcoin (~34% and 31% respectively), others have donated their prized, NFT treasures.
CryptoPunk #5364 — worth more than a Ferrari — has been sent to the Ukrainian government, presumably to be auctioned off somewhere north of $200,000.
If you want to show your support, here is the Ukrainian government’s crypto wallet address:
DISCLAIMER
THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND DO NOT CONSTITUTE FINANCIAL, INVESTMENT, OR OTHER ADVICE.