Original title: (The statue of Satoshi Nakamoto sinks to the bottom of the lake, revealing the anxiety of 'Europe's crypto capital')
Original author: David, Shenchao TechFlow
On the morning of August 3, in Lugano, Switzerland, municipal workers retrieved several stainless steel fragments from the lake.
A few hours ago, these fragments were still a complete statue of Satoshi Nakamoto. An homage from a city to the creator of Bitcoin has now turned into scrap metal at the bottom of the lake.
Twitter user @Grittoshi was the first to notice the statue's disappearance. He recalled that on the night of August 1, Swiss National Day, the statue was still standing in Parco Ciani park. Nearby, young people were raising their glasses in celebration.
A few hours later, this artwork, which took 21 months to design and claimed to 'disappear' when viewed from the front, really disappeared — in a way that no one expected.
Satoshigallery, an art group dedicated to erecting Satoshi statues in 21 cities around the world, quickly offered a reward of 0.1 Bitcoin on social media for clues.
However, the process of solving the case was unexpectedly simple.
It was also netizen @Grittoshi who used 'Occam's Razor' to reason: drunkards after National Day celebrations passed by the statue and may have spontaneously decided to 'have some fun'. They couldn't have moved the statue far, so the most likely thing was to throw it into the nearby lake.
A few hours later, his guess proved correct — municipal workers really fished out the shattered Satoshi from the lake.
No one has been caught, and they may never be. Locals see it as likely a prank by a group of drunken young people.
The statue was only fixed to its base with two welding points, and a few people could easily break it off. In a sense, this is even more frustrating than premeditated destruction: for the destroyers, this valuable statue was merely a toy for drunken amusement.
The statue is indeed broken. Satoshigallery posted on Twitter: 'You can steal our symbol, but you can never steal our soul.'
Satoshi Nakamoto is indeed the soul of the entire crypto industry, but not necessarily that of Lugano, Switzerland.
Behind the bold declaration, last October, this statue had just been unveiled at Lugano's most important blockchain conference, with the mayor personally standing by, calling it a manifestation of the city's digital innovation spirit.
Less than a year later, it was thrown into the lake by citizens.
When the Lugano city government ambitiously vowed to become the 'European crypto capital', there might be a deeper divide than Lake Lugano between the official warm embrace in the most crypto-friendly country in the world and the genuine attitudes of the locals.
The statue can be retrieved, but what about trust?
Lugano Plan B: A crypto capital bought with money?
In March 2022, when Bitcoin was still hovering around $40,000, Lugano's mayor Michele Foletti stood in the spotlight and announced an ambitious plan. Beside him stood Paolo Ardoino, the CTO of stablecoin giant Tether.
The 'Plan B' initiative jointly announced by the two aims to make this small southern Swiss city with only 60,000 residents the 'crypto capital of Europe'.
Plan B, as the name suggests, is an alternative. When the traditional financial system fails, cryptocurrency is that Plan B. But for Lugano, this name has another layer of meaning — when other Swiss cities are already far ahead in the crypto race, it needs a Plan B for a shortcut.
Two years have passed, and the report card looks quite impressive:
According to data released by Tether, the Plan B forum in October 2024 set a record, attracting over 2,500 participants from around the world. During the week of the forum, Lugano recorded 6,121 cryptocurrency transactions.
Nearly 100 merchants in the city accept Bitcoin and USDT payments, and 300 accept the city token LVGA. Even the jerseys of the Lugano football club have the Bitcoin logo printed on them.
But looking closely at these numbers, the situation changes.
What is the total amount of 6,121 transactions? $160,000. So, the average transaction is $26. This data is still too low.
"We chose to print the Bitcoin logo on the jerseys instead of Tether for educational purposes," Ardoino said in an interview. But local merchants privately complained that most customers still preferred to pay by card or cash. Accepting crypto payments felt more like fulfilling the city government's requirements rather than actual business demand.
The relationship between Lugano and Tether is more subtle. The world's largest stablecoin issuer is not only the main sponsor of Plan B but is also deeply involved in the city's digital transformation.
The issue is, is it really wise to bet the city's crypto future on a commercial company, especially when this company itself is full of controversy — Tether's reserve transparency issue still hangs over the crypto world like the sword of Damocles.
The incident of the Satoshi statue being thrown into the lake seems to have become a kind of prophecy.
This supposedly costly artwork pursued visual effects during its design — it would 'disappear' from a certain angle — but overlooked the most basic safety considerations, being fixed with only two welding points.
Is this approach of prioritizing form over substance also a microcosm of the entire Plan B?
While the crypto ecosystem has naturally grown over years within the circle, Lugano chose a shortcut: paving the way with money and creating buzz through marketing. But just like the statue that sank to the bottom of the lake, a technological transplant without social soil may ultimately just be an expensive decoration.
The Swiss crypto landscape, Lugano's misplaced competition
If the Swiss crypto landscape is likened to a marathon, Lugano is undoubtedly the runner who started the latest but is running the hardest.
Zug, a small city with only 30,000 inhabitants, started its crypto journey as early as 2013. When entrepreneur Johann Gevers moved his company Monetas here, 'Crypto Valley' was just a beautiful vision he borrowed from Silicon Valley. But by 2024, Zug had gathered 719 blockchain companies, accounting for 41% of Switzerland.
More importantly, this is where Ethereum was born — if Bitcoin is the Adam of the crypto world, Ethereum is Eve.
The numbers are cold, but they tell a completely different development path. In Zug, 47% of financial services blockchain companies and 43% of infrastructure companies chose to settle here. This is not the result of government planning, but of market's natural selection. Low taxes, loose regulation, and most importantly — an organically grown entrepreneurial ecosystem.
People working in blockchain companies in Zug likely live in the same community, send their children to the same school, and discuss technical issues in the same bar on weekends.
In contrast, the Ticino region where Lugano is located has only 103 blockchain companies in total, but Lugano is unwilling to play a supporting role.
When they launched Plan B in 2022, their strategy was clear: since they couldn't replicate Zug's first-mover advantage, they would find another way. Zug is an engineer's paradise, Geneva is the home of compliance experts, Zurich is the fintech hub, so what does Lugano want to become?
The answer is a testing ground for consumer applications.
Lugano has chosen a seemingly sexier path: allowing ordinary people to use cryptocurrency. However, in the two years since Plan B was launched, most merchants accepting Bitcoin payments seem to be participating in a performance rather than being driven by genuine demand.
The local McDonald's in Lugano accepts Bitcoin payments
Image source: PlanB.lugano
More awkward is the internal competition among Swiss cities. In 2023, Zug announced it would raise the cap on cryptocurrency tax payments from 100,000 Swiss francs to 1.5 million Swiss francs — this is a real application scenario; in the same year, Lugano also issued blockchain bonds worth 100 million Swiss francs. However, this seems innovative, but for ordinary citizens, what’s the difference from traditional bonds?
Lugano seems to want to cover in two years what Zug took ten years to accomplish.
But the crypto ecosystem is not about erecting a statue and calling it a day. It needs time to ferment, requires failed projects to serve as fertilizer, and demands genuine participation from the local community.
The statue of Satoshi Nakamoto being thrown into the lake may not be because the people of Lugano hate Bitcoin, but because they simply don't care.
Pushing a crypto agenda in a city lacking crypto DNA is like planting rice in a desert — not impossible, but the cost is too high and goes against natural laws.
The statue metaphor
The night the Satoshi statue spent at the bottom of the lake may have been the most ironic moment in its existence. This artwork designed to 'pay tribute to the spirit of decentralization' ultimately required centralized municipal power to be salvaged.
When the Lugano officials talk about the blockchain revolution, the citizens have their own life priorities.
Those drunken youths who threw the statue into the lake on Swiss National Day are probably not opponents of cryptocurrency. They likely destroyed the statue just because it was conveniently there — something that seemed fun.
This kind of indifference is scarier than hating cryptocurrency. Hatred at least implies concern, while indifference means 'whatever'.
The deeper issue lies in the development model of 'embracing crypto' itself. The success of Zug in Switzerland stems from ten years of natural growth, an ecosystem cultivated by entrepreneurs, investors, and tech geeks; while Lugano attempts to replicate this process in two years through top-down administrative push.
It's a bit like trying to get the flavor of slow-cooked stew using a microwave — it looks cooked, but the taste is off.
When the government changes, when budgets are tight, and when the next policy hotspot arises, will the crypto-friendly Plan B still be a priority?
The statue can be re-welded, or even reinforced to be as solid as a rock, but once the crack of trust is formed, repairing it is far more difficult than imagined.
The young people who threw Satoshi into the lake are not bad people, but pushing a crypto agenda in a city that is 'whatever' about cryptocurrency may not yield optimistic results.
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