MiamiCoin has raised $24.7 million so far...but who will benefit from it?

Recently, Cointelegraph interviewed Miami Mayor Francis Suarez after announcing that Miami residents with digital wallets could receive a bitcoin bonus.

The company building the infrastructure to deliver bitcoin dividends to citizens is CityCoins, an open-source protocol that provides cities with a fundraising mechanism.

Miami and New York City were the first two cities to start raising funds, through MiamiCoin and NYCCoin respectively. However, neither Miami nor New York City actually own MiamiCoin (MIA) or NYCCoin, instead their vault wallets are filled with Stacks (STX).

MiamiCoin has raised $24.7 million worth of STX, while NYCCoin has raised $30.8 million, which is deposited in its city vaults, according to a presentation by CityCoins community leader Andre Serrano at the North American Bitcoin Conference 2022 in Miami. inside.

In order for residents to obtain CityCoin, they must first purchase STX on an exchange such as Okcoin or Binance. Coinbase had planned to list STX for trading on Tuesday, but delayed the listing until further notice.

Stack is the blockchain that seeks to make Bitcoin (BTC) programmable. CityCoin is a replaceable token built on the Stack blockchain, and each city deploys a CityCoin token contract. Serrano said:

"CityCoin has the potential to change the way people interact with cities by aligning incentives between local governments and city dwellers".

He added that CityCoin could "unlock a city's cultural value while opening up new opportunities for creators," in contrast to Los Angeles, which is famous for Hollywood, and Miami, which if successful, has the potential to become the cryptocurrency capital of the United States.

At a high level, CityCoin is developed by the community. Mining CityCoin is carried out by forwarding STX tokens to the smart contract of a specific Stack block. Miners are then rewarded with new CityCoin tokens. Unlike Bitcoin, CityCoin has no hard cap.

According to Serrano, CityCoin offers cities a business model by incentivizing citizens to earn passive income. 30% of the mining rewards will be sent to the city’s escrow reserve wallet, while 70% of the mining rewards will be distributed to those who choose to stake CityCoin.

He explained that the more valuable MiamiCoin becomes, the more miners are willing to mine it, which increases the number of STX blocks they are willing to contribute. As an indirect result, the funds in the vault grow, and because Stacks generates bitcoins, the proceeds of Miami bitcoin mining can be distributed as dividends to bitcoin holders.

CityCoin is programmable, which means that smart contracts can be developed around CityCoin tokens. Serrano offers some real-world use cases, including giving residents discounts for using public transportation or shopping locally, and even the ability to pay with NFTs. It is also possible that tokens could be used to create local registries and title deeds.

How Miami's money will be distributed has yet to be determined. One of the city's priorities, though, is improving the public education system, Serrano suggested. Once the city decides to claim and convert STX into dollars to fund a public project, residents may start receiving dividends in BTC.

To get public feedback on how Miami should spend its funds, MiamiCoin launched an app called MiamiVoice, which allows residents to submit ideas and vote.