The municipality of Zermatt has announced today that it now accepts Bitcoin as a means of payment for “local taxes and official transactions.”
Zermatt is well-known to skiers all over the world as the beautiful and clean Swiss town that sits at the base of the Matterhorn mountain (which is part of the Swiss Alps). It is “a municipality in the district of Visp in the German-speaking section of the canton of Valais in Switzerland” with a population of around 5,800 inhabitants.
On Wednesday (January 29), Bitcoin Suisse, which is based in the town of Zug (aka Switzerland’s “Crypto Valley”) and has been “pioneering crypto-financial services since 2013” issued a press release that made quite an interesting announcement: Zermatt, with the help of Bitcoin Suisse, had just become the second Swiss municipality to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment. (The first municipality to accept Bitcoin was the town of Zug, which is the capital of the canton of Zug.)
It seems that “a point-of-sale solution provided by Bitcoin Suisse has been installed in the Zermatt town hall, so that fees for services from local authorities can be paid in Bitcoin.”
Also, taxpayers in Zermatt will be able to “pay their taxes at communal level” via Bitcoin. To do so, they first need to apply to the Zermatt Tax Office for “a crypto payment solution”, after which they will be able to “access the online payment portal via an e-mail link and transfer bitcoins directly from their own crypto wallet.” Bitcoin Suisse converts the BTC to Swiss franc (CHF) and sends the CHF amount to the bank account of the municipality.
Armin Schmid, Head of Crypto Payments at Bitcoin Suisse, had this to say:
By accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment, Zermatt finds itself once more among the pioneers and supporting a growing ecosystem of cryptocurrencies.
Featured Image by “Heidelbergerin” via Pixabay
