On June 22, 2021, the CityCoins team held an AMA with Patrick Stanley and Jason Schrader to answer our community’s questions and provide an overview of where we are to date.

If you missed the live AMA, you can view the full AMA recording here and sign up for our newsletter to stay informed on future events.

The below text has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Intro to CityCoins

CityCoins allow you to support your favorite city while earning BTC and STX tokens. This project enables new fundraising methods for cities within the CityCoin ecosystem, supported by local communities and stakeholders everywhere. Aside from generating STX rewards, CityCoins can be used to create apps with a wide range of use cases, ranging from trading & lending and access control of digital and physical spaces to more advanced smart contract execution.

As a result, CityCoins embody the concept of “thinking globally and acting globally” and represent a more positive sum way for people to seamlessly build both their city’s tech stack and revenue.

You can find a full overview of what CityCoins is here.

Mining UI overview

Watch Jason’s basic overview of the CityCoins mining interface and run-through of the CityCoins testnet contract deployment, which lets you interact with all the platform’s contract functions.

Our new mining video tutorial provides a simple primer on how CityCoin mining works, and all current CityCoin documentation can be found here.

Q&A

Why is CityCoins starting with Miami?

Miami is a diverse city with a culture defined by constant evolution and disruption. The city’s leadership is embracing tech and welcoming to crypto, and Mayor Suarez is a technological progressive who welcomes innovation. For all these reasons and more we believe Miami is the perfect city to start with, and anyone can start mining $MIA once it goes live in July. You can sign up to receive more updates on this here.

We believe that while cities can benefit from adopting or mining other crypto projects, they aren’t truly leveraging the crypto markets and empowering their local communities to the maximum extent unless they adopt their own CityCoin.

Are there any hardware requirements for mining?

There are no hardware requirements to mining CityCoins. All you need are STX tokens in order to interact with the CityCoins smart contracts that enable mining. STX can be purchased on OKCoin, and the best way to hold, spend, and transfer STX tokens is through the official Stacks web wallet. We are proud to have a very eco-friendly mining mechanism.

Are CityCoins an alternative form of municipal bond?

I wouldn’t say so. With municipal bonds cities have to issue debt, then cities generally have to tax their citizens in order to get their money back. This creates an antagonistic relationship between a city and its residents. Also citizens typically don’t even hold their own city’s bonds because there is not a lot of upside.

Conversely, with CityCoins everyone who holds the token has a shared interest in the success of the city, earns STX and Bitcoin, and the asset price is based on its intrinsic value and how it's traded in the market. This is a less antagonistic way of supporting a city..

How many Stacks have been committed to community pools to date?

There are community pools right now, but I’m not sure how much is in them. That being said, many folks have reached out to us for more details on how to participate in mining, including some notable people, but needless to say there’s a significant groundswell of interest.

How do I get more involved with the community, and are you hiring?

For now, the best thing to do is sign up for our email newsletter at citycoins.co so you can stay on top of new developments and the $MIA mining launch. An official Discord just rolled out at chat.citycoins.co which will make it easier for our community to collaborate.

In terms of hiring, there is a CityCoins non-profit that is actually looking for some blockchain engineers and some growth marketing types, so if you’re a match for either of these roles you can reach out directly to hello@citycoins.co.

What’s the likelihood that CityCoins will be launched outside of the U.S.?

Very high. We have a U.S.-centric voting process for new cities right now, and our community is currently focusing on making Miami a massive success. However, in addition to urban centers like Zug and Singapore, we believe many overseas cities will “punch above their weight”, such as Bangalore or El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach, and we plan on making it easier to vote for cities outside of the U.S.

Can a CityCoin be created for a city that doesn’t exist?

Yes, we call these cloud formations. Essentially, you can build the community in the cloud and grow it to the point where it can descend upon the land. You can imagine a cloud community adopting a large patch of land in Nevada or Saskatchewan and bootstrapping enough funds to build out that land. Balaji Srinivasan actually has some interesting thoughts on this.

Can you discuss some possible valuation scenarios and potential timelines for achieving them?

Valuation is a function of the market, and demand and utility of the CityCoin tokens is a massive factor. As a result this isn’t something I can effectively forecast, but I will say that once cities claim their treasury wallets it will be an extremely pivotal event, and I don’t expect the markets to be flat once this starts happening.

Are CityCoins’ smart contracts auditable and available for review?

Yes, our smart contracts are undergoing a community audit led by some really great engineers and core developers, and the code is publicly available for anyone to go through.

Can I pick a city and start a CityCoin from scratch on my own?

You can move fast by yourself, but you can go further with a community, so if you’re bullish on a city we should make that happen as a community. It’s my hope that we can launch ~200 cities over the next two years, so let’s try to work together to optimize for the cities with the best story, the most developer interest, and highest likelihood of succeeding – in order to make the biggest overall impact. Let’s win with Miami, and then launch in increasingly more cities together.

Have any exchanges committed to listing $MIA?

We can’t comment.

Why didn’t you create CityCoins on Ethereum?

Solidity is less secure than Stacks’ Clarity language, and we want CityCoins’ architecture to be replicable yet secure. We’re building civilization-level software, so we need nuclear-grade smart contracts, which is Clarity, so we’re not compromising on this.

Also, stacking earns BTC, whereas Ethereum yields Ethereum, and cities want to grow their BTC treasuries right now, so Stacks was the natural solution.

Have you considered the environmental impact of CityCoins?

Definitely, I consider myself an environmentalist, and environmental sustainability is something we’ve taken into consideration.

While PoW blockchains have taken some flak recently, I believe Bitcoin is a necessary, high-torque gear that can be used to power many other “gears”. There only needs to be one PoW blockchain, and you can recycle BTC’s PoW via Stacks’ Proof of Transfer protocol, which essentially lets you forward BTC into new protocols. You can recycle Bitcoin’s computational workload and use it to power new smart contracts and protocols in a way that reduces carbon emissions down to roughly zero.

CityCoins are environmentally friendly.

How do you prevent centralized CityCoins ownership?

There are no pre-mines or ICOs for any CityCoins, and we’ve created a system that allows anyone to participate in the mining process without the need for sophisticated hardware. Also, while we are giving cities a dedicated treasury wallet that is being continuously credited STX & BTC, each city would need to spend the STX in their wallet in order to mine their respective CityCoin. It will be up to them whether or not they take advantage of this.

How do we get more cities listed?

Let’s focus on making sure Mayor Suarez and the rest of Miami are excited about what we’re doing before we return to this question. Hundreds of people have voted on what the next city should be, and there’s plenty coming down the pipeline. Let’s focus and win.

How do cities access their treasury wallet?

We will describe this process more explicitly in the future, but basically it will be an extremely straightforward process in which the city’s financial controller claims custody.

Only the city government has the ability to access these treasury funds, and each city can use these funds for whatever purpose they deem fit (infrastructure improvements, disaster relief, recruiting more crypto startups, etc.). Because each city’s needs are highly localized, we aren’t trying to be prescriptive in terms of how each city uses these funds.

The community doesn’t need the city government to claim their city wallet to begin building new use cases with their CityCoins or to begin mining CityCoins, and the city government doesn’t need community buy-in on how they spend their treasury funds. That being said, all on-chain transactions are available for anyone to see, which allows for a high level of transparency and accountability.

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