Norwegian city sets up its own cryptocurrency

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Always a nation that looks to the future, Norway seems to be setting itself up on the cryptocurrency front too with the latest revelation being a private city and its own feature rich cryptocurrency. The city of Liberstad is set amongst plush vegetation, stunning scenery, beautiful lakes and all you could expect out of a fjord based settlement. What makes it different from the rest is that it has now adopted the City Coin as its own cryptocurrency.

City Coin is a secure and innovative cryptocurrency based on City Chain, a smart city platform that enables the design, implementation and use of next-generation services for smart cities and their inhabitants. With cities usually reliant on public services that are operated by government entities, City Chain gives the opportunity to private cities, such as Liberstad, to build and offer services which are conducted on a private, voluntary and internal basis.

At City Chain’s core is the principle that while governments and rulers come and go, cities endure. The key ingredient for the development and prosperity of sustainable and free city-societies went undiscovered until the recent invention of blockchain technology. Blockchains are immutable decentralized networks that allow people to interact with each other in a disintermediated, peer-to-peer fashion by way of inherent trust.

Using blockchain as its basis, City Chain has created a smart city platform that hosts a suite of features for emerging cities like Liberstad. Foremost amongst those features is City Hub, an intuitive and simple-to-use dashboard for smart city inhabitants. By accessing City Hub using a municipal app, citizens can interact with the community, manage their identities, create city-wide initiatives or vote on existing ones, register property, contract insurance and more.

While the broader features of City Hub are under development by the City Chain Foundation, the platform’s native currency, City Coin, is tradeable and functional today. City Coin is based on a proof-of-stake algorithm which, unlike Bitcoin’s proof-of-work model, is both environmentally friendly and simple to participate in for those without high-end mining rigs.

As the first cryptocurrency to be officially adopted by a smart city, City Coin is currently the only medium of exchange within Liberstad. It will be used for the payment of city services and worker wages and for funding civic projects. Inhabitants can pay for anything ranging from haircuts, a batch of local eggs or an artisan loaf of bread using City Coin, marking a milestone for real-world use of blockchain technology. More than 100 land plots have already been sold within Liberstad and more will become available to purchase using the crypto in the near future.