Cryptocurrency is becoming mainstream and is here to stay. There’s no better evidence of this than when a country adopts a cryptocurrency as a legal tender. The Swiss city of Lugano will now become the first city to recognize both Tether (USDT) and Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tenders in Europe. The announcement was made by the mayor of the City of Lugano, Michele Foletti.
Innovative city to become cryptocurrency hub of Europe
The City of Lugano’s decision to make cryptocurrencies a legal tender was done with the goal of becoming the European cryptocurrency hub. Residents in the city will be able to invest, transact and even pay their taxes using Tether or Bitcoin when the cryptocurrencies will be officially approved as a de facto legal tender within the city.
This isn’t a surprising move, especially for Lugano. Lugano has been known for its fast adoption of innovative technology. The move to adopt Bitcoin and Tether as legal tenders was the result of 18 months of planning. The city began to experiment with adopting blockchain technology for day to day transactions using cryptocurrencies in 2020. The city even went all the way to launch a loyalty program that featured its own points token known as LVGA. Lugano established its own Proof-of-Authority blockchain last year on which LVGA was used for transactions.
With a population of 60,000, Lugano is currently southern Switzerland’s economic capital. The city has always been at the forefront of creating new opportunities. It only seems fit that the city would lead the way in the adoption of cryptocurrency for day to day transactions.
The city collaborated with Tether, the stablecoin, to accelerate the adoption of blockchain in the city. According to the City’s Director, Pietro Poretti, adopting cryptocurrency is about creating opportunities for the city. The collaboration between the city and Tether will most likely attract even more opportunities to partner with other enterprises. It may attract other enterprises to the city.
The city chose Polygon as their major infrastructure partner to support payments using stablecoin. Polygon comes in second after Ethereum in supporting USDT transactions. The city settled on using Polygon because of its low latency. The platform is also low cost and offers greater scalability.
Scalability and low cost were critical to the city. This is because the scope of crypto adoption in the city is expected to expand. The city has already taken steps to integrate crypto payments in the public sector. A wide variety of public services are already available in cryptocurrency. These include municipal and personal taxes payments, document issuing fees, and accessing public infrastructure.
Adoption by the public sector is expected to be much faster and easier. More than 200 firms based in the city have already acquired the technology to support cryptocurrency payments.
