The city of Lugano's payment app welcomes a new network: Polygon. This makes "MyLugano" a multichain wallet that offers Ticino residents crypto payments with various assets. In addition, the city of Lugano is creating an NFT collection on the Polygon blockchain.
Since March 2022, the city of Lugano has been competing with Zug as Switzerland's leading blockchain hub under "Plan B". Part of the initiative, which was co-developed by the world's largest stablecoin provider Tether, was the development of a payment app. MyLugano was intended to bring the local population closer to the local cryptocurrency LVGA ("Luga") through a loyalty circuit. In addition to Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT) and LVGA, the app now also supports the polygon-native token MATIC, as the project announced in a blog post.
Plan B goes "multichain"
With Plan B, the city of Lugano wants to transform the Ticino town at the lake into the blockchain capital of Europe. Citizens and businesses can use the supported cryptocurrencies to pay their annual taxes, parking tickets, public services and tuition fees. The blockchain tokens thus enjoy the status of legal tender. The Polygon network will provide the rails for Lugano on which some of the transactions run.
Over 30,000 people currently use the MyLugano app. Almost 400 branches support crypto payments with refunds of 10% in LVGA. Thanks to the Polygon integration, the app's functionality is expanded to include access to the network's Web3 ecosystem. In particular, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the blockchain are given their dedicated spot.
Lugano launches NFT collection on Polygon
To celebrate the partnership, MyLugano created its own NFT collection dedicated to the work of artist Yuri Catania. "LVGA/XY Flowers", created in collaboration with the Lugano Living Lab, is a 40-meter-long and 8-meter-high work on the wall of the Palazzo dei Congressi. Several hundred people were involved in its creation.
The physical work, which was created using the paste-up technique, will gradually disappear. The more than 2,000 paper flowers glued to the wall will become real flowers and be planted in a new green space. The artwork will also live on as NFTs on the Polygon network, signed by the artist and distributed to everyone who was involved in its creation.