The Stacks Ventures project incubator has accepted 11 projects, helping to make CityCoins more attractive to mayors around the world who want to use digital assets to reward and promote economic development.
Stacks Ventures is a $4 million incubator for projects on the Stacks (STX) Bitcoin layer-two smart contract solution. CityCoins enables city governments that partner with it to launch their own tokens on Stacks, and Miami and New York City are the first two cities to partner with it and launch MiamiCoin and NYCCoin, respectively.
As part of the partnership, local governments are rewarded with CityCoin and stake assets for additional Bitcoin rewards.
Among the second batch of 24 projects to be incubated, Stacks Ventures will incubate 11 projects, adding wireless networks, Web3, games, non-fungible tokens (NFT), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), education to CityCoins and decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities.
Beyond these additional features, Stacks Ventures partner Trevor Owens told Cointelegraph that generating bitcoin returns could “replace a city’s tax base.” Essentially, the city may gain enough to cover all the costs that would have been covered by taxes, he said.
Cities using CityCoins will receive a 30% STX reward. Mayors can directly sell STX rewards for USD, or accumulate tokens to earn Bitcoin income. Accumulating on the Stacks network is similar to staking tokens on Ethereum.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said in November last year that Miami would use the rewards to generate bitcoin revenue that would be distributed to residents of Miami.
Owens believes that adding NFT, DeFi, and Web3 to CityCoins will create the greatest opportunity for future cities. He said: "Web3 is about ownership, and NFT can be used for ownership of all non-fungible assets."
“Mayors can see that this is within reach. They can add services and apps through CityCoins to make residents happier and healthier.”
CityCoins founder Patrick Stanley believes that a new startup working on CityCoins will help it fulfill its mission to “advance the health, wealth and happiness of cities and their citizens.” Ultimately, however, he hopes the project will launch a stablecoin.
He told Cointelegraph today, “People will always move towards stable assets because the cognitive overhead of volatile assets is too high.” Therefore, a volatile asset like Bitcoin will likely not become a currency.
As CityCoins grows to serve more cities and more people, Stanley sees the project as a way to help cities, through stablecoins, combat inflation, which he believes hurts the poor the most. He said:
“Cities may now have to protect their citizens from inflation. Wouldn’t it be great if they could do this through a stablecoin that earns Bitcoin yield?”
Inflation in the U.S. is now at 8.5%, the highest since 1981, according to the economic tracker US Inflation Calculator.
Stanley’s enthusiasm for stablecoins as a tool to drive cryptocurrency adoption is echoed by VegaX’s Sang Lee, who believes stablecoins are critical to the expansion of cryptocurrencies into capital markets.
Regardless of the circumstances, Stanley believes that sooner or later everyone will hold cryptocurrencies as their familiarity and accessibility increase. Among the new startups joining Stacks Ventures is an education-focused company that could potentially help educate the public about bitcoin.
Since launching last summer, Miami and New York City have begun using CityCoins to generate income for their residents. The city government of Philadelphia has expressed interest in partnering with CityCoins, and Austin appears poised to join Miami and New York.
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