Crypto Cities
Discussion
Vitalik Buterin:
“One interesting trend of the last year has been the growth of interest in local government, and in the idea of local governments that have wider variance and do more experimentation. Over the past year, Miami mayor Francis Suarez has pursued a Twitter-heavy tech-startup-like strategy of attracting interest in the city, frequently engaging with the mainstream tech industry and crypto community on Twitter. Wyoming now has a DAO-friendly legal structure, Colorado is experimenting with quadratic voting, and we're seeing more and more experiments making more pedestrian-friendly street environments for the offline world. We're even seeing projects with varying degrees of radicalness - Cul de sac, Telosa, CityDAO, Nkwashi, Prospera and many more - trying to create entire neighborhoods and cities from scratch. Another interesting trend of the last year has been the rapid mainstreaming of crypto ideas such as coins, non-fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). So what would happen if we combine the two trends together? Does it make sense to have a city with a coin, an NFT, a DAO, some record-keeping on-chain for anti-corruption, or even all four?'
(https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/10/31/cities.html
Examples
Vitalik Buterin:
"As it turns out, there are already people trying to do just that:
- CityCoins.co, a project that sets up coins intended to become local media of exchange, where a portion of the issuance of the coin goes to the city government. MiamiCoin already exists, and "San Francisco Coin" appears to be coming soon.
- Other experiments with coin issuance (eg. see this project in Seoul)
- Experiments with NFTs, often as a way of funding local artists. Busan is hosting a government-backed conference exploring what they could do with NFTs.
- Reno mayor Hillary Schieve's expansive vision for blockchainifying the city, including NFT sales to support local art, a RenoDAO with RenoCoins issued to local residents that could get revenue from the government renting out properties, blockchain-secured lotteries, blockchain voting and more.
Much more ambitious projects creating crypto-oriented cities from scratch: see CityDAO, which describes itself as, well, "building a city on the Ethereum blockchain" - DAOified governance and all.”