Kolion

The kolion is a cryptocurrency coin created by Mikhail Shlyapnikov to support the farmers of Kolionovo, a small town located 125 km south-east of Moscow, to trade real goods and services.^[1] The coin gained notoriety after Mikhail Shlyapnikov was arrested, and afterwards, kolion was declared an illegal tender in Russia.

Design

Kolion notes are one-sided and come in denominations of one, three, five, ten, twenty-five and fifty Kolion notes. The printed money is multicoloured and each note contains the words;

“This note is the property of the Kolionovo exchequer. It does not undergo inflation, deflation, stagnation or other falsifications. It is not a means of enrichment or speculation. It is supported by the resources of Kolionovo. Or maybe it’s a fake…”^[2]

History

The kolion was created by Mikhail Shlyapnikov in 2014.^[3] They were pegged at a bag of potatoes or a goose, which allowed him sell his crops for half their price, trade with suppliers, and pay his workers, inside Kolionovo. He was also able to transform an old village hospital into a greenhouse. In 2015, a criminal case was built against him for issuing his own paper currency and Kolion was banned after the court concluded that his actions demeaned the government’s financial system. In 2016, after rejecting discouragement, Shlyapnikov launched the first ICO fundraiser on blockchain, receiving the equivalent of about 800,000 rubles on Emercoin. In April 2017, he released the kolion token [KLN] on the Waves platform and received 401 bitcoins, equivalent to 31.6 million rubles, in one month, from 103 investors.^[4] In January 7, 2018, Kolion recorded its all time high, reaching an estimated value of 9.26 dollars.^[5] In February 2018, Shlyapnikov had received a sum of 300 million rubles from the Waves platform.^[6]