The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, revealed renderings earlier this week of Bitcoin City, a city made to look like a Bitcoin. It’s a design by Mexican architect Fernando Romero, founder of the firm FR-EE, who cast the scale model in a gold color. “Bitcoin City is coming along beautifully,” Bukele tweeted alongside a photo of the model.
The proposed city, which is in the shape of a coin (also known as a circle), is supposed to sit between the Gulf of Fonseca and the Conchagua volcano. The pitch is to power both the city and Bitcoin mining with the volcano’s geothermal energy, although the timing of the release was perhaps unfortunate. On Thursday, CNBC reported the broad sell-off in crypto had “erased more than $200 billion from the entire market in a single day.”