Over the weekend, thousands of Bitcoiners and crypto enthusiasts descended on the small, sleepy Swiss town of Lugano. More specifically, they piled onto a McDonald’s restaurant.
Perched on Lake Lugano, Mcdonald’s Lugano received countless visits from Bitcoiners keen to trade Satoshis (the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin) for Big Macs, McFlurrys and coffee.
But why were European crypto enthusiasts excited to pay in Bitcoin (BTC) at one of the world’s most recognizable brands? Well, firstly to demonstrate the Lightning Network, a Layer-2 technology built atop Bitcoin. But also to live up to Satoshi Nakamoto’s promise that Bitcoin is, in fact, an electronic cash system.
McDonald’s order paid with #Bitcoin over the Lightning Network.
Went for a Saifedean style order. pic.twitter.com/srIsj9SAfB
— ₿ GANDALF (@BTCGandalf) October 27, 2022
The entire McDonald’s team had been educated and onboarded onto the Bitcoin network just days before the major European Bitcoin and blockchain conference, the Plan B Forum, Tether chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino told Cointelegraph.
The Italian ex-pat gave Cointelegraph an overview of Bitcoin and crypto adoption in Lugano, joking that the hands-on process of educating merchants on how to accept crypto can be time-consuming: “At McDonald’s, we spend like one week because they have a ton of people working there.”
Ardoino’s company, Tether, orchestrated a broad plan for the economic capital of Italian-speaking Switzerland to adopt Bitcoin and crypto. What commenced as a plan for citizens to pay their taxes in crypto has morphed into a summer school called Plan B, a conference named the Plan B Forum and crypto merchant adoption — spearheaded by McDonald’s.
Cointelegraph investigated Bitcoin and crypto merchant adoption to better understand how countries, regions — or in this case — cities can adopt crypto in a meaningful way. Is it possible, for example, to live on crypto in Lugano?
Ardoino explained that over the past few months, the Plan B team has onboarded over 60 merchants to accept crypto, but growth in merchants and crypto payments is really starting to ramp up:
“Basically when we had 30 merchants before reaching 600 hundred [crypto] transactions. And in the last five days ago we had 600 transactions.”
The team at Plan B intends to hit 1,000 merchants accepting crypto by Q2 2022. “We have a business team that will run around…
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