Residents can now pay taxes, fines and city bills in Lugano in Bitcoin or USDT, with instant conversion to Swiss Francs.
Summary
- Swiss city of Lugano adopts Bitcoin payment push
- More than 350 merchants use Lightning and the MyLugano app, offering up to 10% LVGA cashback to close a true loop of the circular economy.
- The Plan ₿ Forum now attracts more than 4,000 visitors as Lugano positions itself as a working Bitcoin hub and not just a marketing slogan.
On the granite steps outside Lugano City Hall, the most common question was about permit forms or parking disputes; now clerks say they hear another one several times a day: “Can I pay for this in Bitcoin?”. In most cities that would still be a punchline. In Lugano the answer is an unremarkable ‘Yes, of course’.
Under the city’s Plan ₿ initiative, residents can now pay virtually any municipal bill (income and corporate taxes, parking fines, college tuition, trash collection fees) with Bitcoin (BTC) or Tether’s dollar-pegged USDT. “Invoices issued by the City of Lugano can be paid using BTC, Bitcoin on Lightning Network and USDT,” the municipality bluntly says on its payments page, adding that there is “no amount limit” even for seven-figure tax bills.
The microstructure is important. Payments are made directly via Lightning or through Bitcoin Suisse as a processing partner, which charges a 1% fee embedded in the currency rate to manage crypto-to-franc conversion risk. For small merchants and cafe owners who used to pay a 2.5 to 3.4% card fee on every cappuccino, that difference is not an academic basis point spread; it’s their margin.
City officials are quick to emphasize that Lugano is not building a Bitcoin treasury. “Any amount paid in cryptocurrency will be immediately converted into Swiss francs and paid to the city,” the directive said, positioning crypto less as a balance sheet bet and more as an entry rail for residents who already own BTC or USDT. Ignore the maximalist rhetoric for a moment; structurally, this is a payment transaction, not a HODL manifesto
Yet the layer of the circular economy built on top of that plumbing looks much more ideological. Through the city-backed MyLugano app, shoppers earn up to 10% cashback in LVGA tokens when paying with crypto at participating businesses, and those tokens can be funneled directly back into municipal services, public parking and childcare benefits. “It proves that a circular economy is now possible,” say local initiators; In practice, this means people literally buy espresso on Via Nassa with Bitcoin and get LVGA that they later burn on kindergarten bills.
Seller coverage is no longer a talking point on a slide deck; it is visible at street level. Plan ₿ and the city say more than 350 merchants now accept Lightning payments, a number that appears not only in press releases but also in the sticker clusters on store doors from gelaterias to vintage watch resellers. One store owner quoted in a recent report put it bluntly: “Bitcoin fees are less than 1%, my card terminal costs up to 3.4% – I don’t need a philosophy degree to choose.”
The institutional signal is just as clear on the conference circuit. The fourth Plan ₿ Forum, held on October 24 and 25, 2025 at the Convention Center and Villa Ciani, attracted more than 4,000 participants from 64 countries, a 140% increase from the initiative’s launch in 2022 and a 38% increase from last year. “Lugano is moving towards a working model of Bitcoin adoption and open technology,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said at the event, arguing that “people are using Bitcoin for payments… and that momentum continues to grow every year.”
For traders who look at market structure rather than city budgets, Lugano’s rollout puts them in a strange situation. While BTC is gnawing away at just under $90,000 of meager year-end liquidity, while ETFs are leaking coins and perpetrators are showing only slightly positive funding after a failed sweep from Monday’s low, this isn’t the kind of story that will send the price vertically higher tomorrow morning. Yet it hardens the ground: every citizen bill paid in BTC and converted into francs is silent selling pressure, yet every Lightning POS installed is another reason the locals keep a warm wallet topped up, another slow source of demand when the next panic flush uses longs.
Does this change today’s trading? Probably not; this rally is still dying out, the second BTC meaningfully falls back below recent ETF inflows levels and the area between 85,000 and 86,000 goes from bid to air. But anyone counting on Bitcoin to remain a purely speculative macro instrument, divorced from actual municipal cash flows, must now explain why a lakeside Swiss tax office is more comfortable with on-chain money than most G20 government bonds.
For Lugano the calculation is simpler. “Plan ₿ brings together the builders and thinkers who make decentralization a reality,” Ardoino argued; the city, in turn, seems less interested in the slogans than in the fact that cafes get paid, taxes are freed and merchants shave a few percentage points off their fees. In other words: less moon, more receipts.
