Cities around the world are incorporating blockchain and cryptocurrency projects into their growth and development strategies. According to reports, Buenos Aires will set up validator nodes for the Ethereum chain in 2023. At ETH Latam, a local event focused on Ethereum, Diego Fernandez, the city’s secretary of Innovation and Digital Transformation, reported this.
Fernandez made it clear that the city’s interest in running these nodes had an exploratory purpose and that they anticipated that doing so would give them a better understanding of the Ethereum chain, enabling them to better regulate digital currency.
The hardware to set up these nodes will be deployed by private companies, who will also be partnering with us to deploy the nodes. The secretary did not give more information about how many nodes would be deployed or the specific date of this deployment program.
However, with this move, Buenos Aires would be one of the pioneer cities in Latam to host its own cryptocurrency nodes.
Crypto Taxes and ID
There has long been a fascination with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Since the beginning of the year, Buenos Aires has been considering and putting forth cryptocurrency-focused solutions. In April of last year, the city made the decision to let residents use cryptocurrencies to pay their taxes. According to reports, the initiative is a component of a plan to automate and digitize some of the city’s operations.
The government is also developing a platform to integrate citizen identity into a blockchain-based network. The TangoID platform has been under development since last March. The government of Buenos Aires anticipates that this system will be operational in January 2023.
About this development and its objectives, Fernandez stated:
The objective of the project is to build, in consensus with the community, a system of digital interactions, which begins with the exchange of documents and personal credentials.
The project, which already has a whitepaper available for the community to read, promotes the concept of self-sovereign identity and will run on top of Starkware, a layer 2 Ethereum protocol.