Photo by Michael Campina; manipulation by Joshua Ceballos
Audio By Carbonatix
Step aside, Miami Bull. There’s a new cryptocurrency statue in town.
At Cantor Fitzgerald’s three-day Cryptocurrency, Artificial Intelligence, and Energy Infrastructure Conference in Miami Beach, Cantor Chairman Brandon Lutnick and Executive Vice Chairman Kyle Lutnick unveiled a statue on Tuesday in honor of the pseudonymous Bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto, which will soon be on display in the Magic City.
“Satoshi has come to the US! So Proud to bring this powerful sculpture to the city of Miami @satoshigallery,” Brandon wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The Satoshi Nakamoto statue created by Italian artist Valentina Picozzi honors the mysterious person who developed Bitcoin. The metal statue depicts a hacker sitting with his legs crossed and a laptop on his lap. It will join the ranks of four identical Satoshi statues in Switzerland, El Salvador, Japan, and Vietnam.
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“The statue itself aims to give the viewer a sense of disappearance — the feeling that the inventor remains between the lines,” the Satoshi gallery website states. “When the observer places themselves behind the statue, they become Satoshi because ‘we are all Satoshi.'”
Nakamoto began developing Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with the highest market capitalization, in 2007, then seemingly vanished. The coder has not touched their wallet, with an estimated 1.1 million Bitcoins currently valued at $111 billion, since 2010. Journalists and crypto bros have speculated about the developer’s identity for over a decade, with little to show for it.
Miami’s crypto-obsessed Mayor Francis Suarez wrote on X that the statue will permanently sit in “one of our greatest parks by the water.” This statue joins a list of public officials’ passion projects on display in Miami, which includes Joe Carollo’s precious walkway of massive, colorful dogs and cats at Maurice A. Ferré Park and Suarez’s 11-foot crypto Bull on the Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus.
As Suarez is set to leave his mayoral post at the end of the year, he appears to be seeking to cement his legacy as the “most bitcoin-friendly Mayor on the planet.”
Yet, his crypto track record is fraught, at best. Remember MiamiCoin? He boasted that the revenue generated by the now worthless city token could one day replace city taxes. He also claimed that the cryptocurrency could generate $60 million over the course of the year. Those ambitions were short-lived, as the coin completely collapsed just two years after its launch. In 2023, the only exchange that supported MiamiCoin suspended trading of the token.
In response to Suarez’s latest homage to Bitcoin, one social media user inquired, “What happened to Miami Coin?”
