Two kinds of centralization. One alternative.
Most businesses depend on platforms that sit between them and their customers and take a share of every transaction. Most cities depend on infrastructure, from energy and housing to workspaces and food supply, that is owned and controlled by someone far from the people who use it. Both models concentrate value at the centre and leave the people at the edge with little say.
Neither is designed to grow the people inside it. MyCity starts from a different question: what if the infrastructure of a city were owned by the community that uses it, built to be sustainable, and designed to develop better people and better facilities over time?
MyCity builds community-owned city infrastructure on the principles Bitcoin proved at the level of money: peer-to-peer ownership, no central gatekeeper, and value flowing to the people who build it, not to those who fund it from outside. Bitcoin is one of our tools for doing that. MyCity is the brand, the community and the model.
// How this differs
Other "Bitcoin city" projects, and where MyCity differs
Several projects use the label "Bitcoin city". They are real efforts, and they differ from what MyCity is building in one important way: who owns the infrastructure.
The first three models are real achievements. But each one hands ownership to a single authority, whether a government, an existing merchant class, or a private developer. The people who live and work in these cities participate as residents and customers, not as co-owners. That is the gap MyCity is designed to close.
// Bitcoin's role in the MyCity Model
Bitcoin is the monetary layer. Infrastructure is the hard part.
Bitcoin's contribution to any city is not primarily its price. It is its properties: fixed supply, permissionless access, no central authority, global settlement without a banking intermediary. These properties make Bitcoin the ideal monetary standard for a community that does not want to depend on a single government's currency or a single bank's permission to transact.
But a monetary standard, on its own, does not build a city. Cities are infrastructure: places to live, food to eat, fibre to work on, co-working spaces, farms, logistics, energy. A community holding Bitcoin still needs all of these things. And if it acquires them through conventional means, it is simply a Bitcoin-holding community living inside conventional city infrastructure owned by someone else.
The question is: how do you build the physical infrastructure of a city on the same peer-to-peer principles as the money? That is the question the MyCity Model is built to answer.
// How MyCity builds city infrastructure
How the MyCity Model is built, peer by peer
MyCity's approach to decentralized city infrastructure is not theoretical. It is a specific, replicable structure that turns educated peers into co-builders of real-world entities, which together form the physical infrastructure of a city built on peer-to-peer principles.
The building block is not a government bond or a venture capital round. It is the peer-to-peer pool: a group of individuals who educate themselves, hold their own stablecoins, and collectively organise as a DAO to build or acquire a piece of physical infrastructure.
// The ownership architecture
How ownership is structured across the network
The ownership model is the same across every entity in the MyCity network. MyCity leads each entity as its Anchor, to ensure continuity and accountability. The peers who built the entity hold a defined share of it, the Commons, set per entity and published with its plan. And every entity holds a small stake back in MyCity, creating circular, aligned ownership across the entire ecosystem.
The peers who participated in building that entity hold a defined share of it, set per entity and published with its plan. Every entity's success strengthens the network. The network's growth creates more entities for the next group of peers to build.
This structure replicates itself. Each entity is legally independent, locally compliant, and peer-owned. But each is also a node in a network that shares governance principles, economic tools, and a common monetary standard. That is what makes it a city, rather than a collection of separate businesses.
Sri Lanka is not an arbitrary starting point. It offers the cost structure, the visa framework, the coastline, and the community of digital nomads and remote workers that makes peer-owned city infrastructure viable at small scale first. The model that works in Galle or Ella can be replicated in any city where the conditions are right. Sri Lanka is the proof of concept. The world is the market.
// What makes it peer-to-peer
The Bitcoin standard, applied to physical space
Bitcoin's core properties are not just monetary principles. They are organizational principles. Fixed supply means no dilution. Permissionless access means no gatekeeper. Peer-to-peer means no intermediary extracting value between participants. Verification over trust means the rules are encoded, not promised.
MyCity applies each of these principles to the way it builds physical infrastructure. The peer-to-peer pool has no fund manager extracting fees. The ownership structure has no insider allocation or founder's equity cliff. The DAO governance means rules are encoded in the structure, not dependent on any single person's decisions. The stablecoin settlement layer means value moves between peers without a bank in the middle.
A city built on Bitcoin principles does not just use Bitcoin as money. It uses Bitcoin as a design specification: decentralized, peer-owned, permissionless, and governed by code rather than by gatekeepers. Every MyCity entity is built to this standard. The city that emerges is, by architecture, a peer-to-peer city.
A city is not a building. It is a network.
Other projects needed a volcano, a presidential decree or a royal mandate. MyCity needs something more available and more durable: educated peers who understand their tools and choose to build together. The network starts in Sri Lanka. It extends to every city where people are choosing to live and work on their own terms. One entity at a time, one peer at a time, the infrastructure compounds. That is how you build a peer-to-peer city without waiting for permission.
// How it is funded
How MyCity sustains the infrastructure
A city that owns its infrastructure has to be able to pay for it. Roads, power, connectivity and shared workspaces cost real money, and we do not want to fund them by selling the community to outside shareholders. MyCity's income comes from three places: the web, app and SEO work we do with businesses, the listings and plans on the platform, and our own trading. We intend to reinvest what these produce in the shared infrastructure, digital first and physical over time, so the businesses and communities on MyCity benefit as it grows.
About our trading
MyCity runs its own trading strategy on Binance futures. Where they are eligible, people can choose to follow it through Binance's copy-trading feature, from their own account and at their own risk: individuals through CopyTrade for individuals, and registered companies through CopyTrade for entities. This is not a managed fund: MyCity does not pool or hold anyone's funds, and access is not offered as a way to earn returns. Binance settles its own profit share automatically, and MyCity charges a one-time access fee of its own, which Binance does not require. It covers getting people set up and helping them understand how to use copy trading, and keeps the private group selective. Fees and eligibility are set out on each programme page.
// Common questions
What people ask about decentralized city infrastructure
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Is this the same as El Salvador's Bitcoin City?
No. El Salvador's Bitcoin City is a government-led, top-down urban development project funded by sovereign bonds. MyCity builds decentralized city infrastructure from the bottom up, through peer-to-peer pools that organise as DAOs. The monetary standard is similar — Bitcoin and stablecoins as the settlement layer — but the ownership model is the opposite.
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Does MyCity only work in Sri Lanka?
Phase 1 is Sri Lanka. The model is designed to be replicated in any jurisdiction where a peer-to-peer pool can organise as a DAO and, where local law needs it, use a legal wrapper to hold physical assets. Legal-wrapper rules differ by jurisdiction, and equivalent structures exist in most of them. Sri Lanka is where the model is being proven. The long-term vision is global.
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How does a DAO work in Sri Lanka for physical assets?
The DAO layer does not hold assets directly. It coordinates peer-to-peer pools and works through legal wrappers, registered under local law, for real-world entities. Those wrappers hold the physical assets on its behalf — land, buildings, equipment. The DAO governance layer sets the principles; the legal wrappers carry them out. This bridges decentralized coordination with locally compliant ownership.
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What kind of infrastructure does MyCity build?
Any infrastructure that a city needs: co-living spaces, co-working hubs, food production (farms), logistics, renewable energy, content studios. The first entities are focused on the needs of digital nomads and remote workers, because that community is already in Sri Lanka and already aligned with Bitcoin principles. As the network grows, the infrastructure diversifies.
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How do I become part of building this?
The entry point is education. Every peer begins by understanding Bitcoin, stablecoins, and how peer-to-peer pools work. Once you hold your own digital assets and understand the tools, you can join an active pool and participate in entity creation. The full pathway is explained in our piece on the decentralized ownership model.
