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A community account of how TALER came to be - written from the perspective of early enthusiasts who lived through the project’s first months. This is not an official press release. It is a candid retelling of how things actually happened in 2017 and early 2018.

2017: Two Founders and a Constructor

In the beginning there were two: Lavnikevich (henceforth “the Creator”) and Lavrinenko. In 2017 they spawned TALER on walletbuilders.com - a service that lets anyone create their own cryptocurrency in five minutes without writing a single line of code. They allocated themselves a 10% premine of the total emission - 2,333,333 coins - supposedly for “developing the project,” and quietly mined for three more weeks “in test mode,” but on the main network for some reason.

Mining pools and block explorers were stood up by community enthusiasts. The same enthusiasts later launched the first exchange that listed TALER. Meanwhile, the Creators proudly proclaimed: “We made the first Belarusian cryptocurrency.” Well - sort of. They made a fork of Litecoin running on the scrypt algorithm.

After the announcement on bitcointalk.org, Chinese miners with ASICs showed up and immediately took over most of the hashrate. (One early member of the community rented an ASIC and mined TALER himself, getting 5–10× the rental cost back as profit.)

Anticipating Decree No. 8

At that time, Belarus was preparing Presidential Decree No. 8 - a piece of legislation meant to bring cryptocurrencies into the country’s legal framework. Expectations across the local crypto scene were enormous.

The Creators rode the wave: they toured crypto conferences, gave interviews, integrated a payment gateway (you could top up your phone balance with TALER), and the community organized a marketplace where goods could be bought and sold for TLR.

November 24, 2017: The Hardfork to Lyra2Z

Chinese ASIC operators kept dominating the network. To “exclude” them, the team decided to hardfork the chain and switch the algorithm to Lyra2Z - a memory-hard PoW that, at the time, had no ASIC support and could be mined efficiently on both GPU and CPU.

The fork happened at block 10,000 on November 24, 2017. Around the same time, TALER got its first (and at that point, only) full-time developer, and the project got its public repository at github.com/taler-project/taler.

The Premine and the Controversies

Decree No. 8 was still pending. The expectation was that TALER would be folded into the local economy through merchant programs, business loyalty schemes, and similar bridges to the real world.

Lavnikevich publicly thumped his chest and swore the premine would be distributed for free to participating businesses. To this day, no community member knows of anyone who ever received their promised 50,000 TLR for free. Persistent rumors said that the premine was simply being sold by the Creator on the open market.

But the price was rising, and so was the market cap. Strange figures gathered around the Creators. One of them was Yevgeniy - who took roughly 45,000 (in either USD or TLR - the unit and the exact amount remain disputed) “for promotion and listing on Yobit, or maybe Binance” - and proceeded to gamble it all away in a casino, being a compulsive gambler. A receipt in his handwriting reportedly still circulates as a screenshot in some chats. Scandals, intrigue, and unofficial investigations followed.

December 2017 – January 2018: The Peak

In December, Decree No. 8 finally came out - but it added no real clarity for projects like TALER.

In January 2018, Bitcoin hit $20,000 and TALER reached $0.4 – $0.5. That was the peak of its popularity.

Then Bitcoin started falling, and TALER fell with it. And after that came the era of truly remarkable stories.

January 2018: Public Image vs. Reality

The Creators kept doing PR at the peak. Two contemporary pieces capture how they presented the project - and both should be read critically against everything described above:

  • An Onliner interview from 23 January 2018 where Lavnikevich openly named the 10% premine (~2.2M coins), listed three operational mining pools (taler-pool.online, talerpool.by, tlr.idcray.com), promised international exchange listings by early February and Belarusian listings after Decree No. 8 took effect on 28 March 2018, and described the premine as funding for infrastructure, social media, exchange-listing fees, and “free TALER for small businesses.” His main answer to scam accusations was a meta-argument: “creators of scam projects don’t advertise themselves… we are maximally transparent.”
  • A dev.by retrospective from the Creators themselves describing Lavnikevich (economist) studying blockchain since January 2017, Lavrinenko (IT manager) joining later, the first transaction on 13 September 2017, the public announcement on 6 October 2017, and dramatic moments such as government officials asking them to postpone the press conference and Lavnikevich being dropped from the SmartTaler 2017 conference program on 25 November. The piece frames TALER as “developed by us” with a focus on business adoption.

Both should be read remembering that “developed” really means “configured in five minutes on walletbuilders.com,” and that the premine described as transparent funding never delivered the free coins promised to businesses.

February 2018: The Founders Walk Away

In February 2018, Lavrinenko publicly announced he was leaving TALER - citing internal disputes with Lavnikevich and famously stating “a ship cannot have two captains.” He handed over his share of the premine to Lavnikevich.

Right after that, Lavnikevich said he too was leaving the project, and that the entire premine would be transferred to Veyshnoria. The exit was reported on 23 February 2018: dev.by - TALER creators are done with it.

A few days later he reversed course and returned. The premine had not actually been handed over. By the time of the comeback, the original “I’m leaving and giving everything to Veyshnoria” post had been quietly edited into something much softer:

“I, in turn, transfer my share of the premine for temporary safekeeping to the virtual project ‘Veyshnoria’. Until the next stage of the project’s development.”

Around this same time, the Creator suddenly broke his leg. Possibly just a coincidence.

Aside: What Was “Veyshnoria”?

Quick context, since the term is going to keep coming up.

Veyshnoria was a fictional country invented in July 2017 for the joint Russian–Belarusian military exercise Zapad-2017. The Belarusian internet seized on it instantly and turned it into a civic meme - a stand-in for an idealized Belarus (Belarusian-speaking, oriented toward Europe rather than Moscow), complete with a flag, an anthem, an “e-consulate” handing out online passports, and a claimed national currency: TALER. That last detail is why the name keeps showing up here.

By 2018 the meme had grown into a real online community - almost 20,000 people had signed up for “Veyshnorian citizenship.” When Lavnikevich said he was “transferring everything to Veyshnoria,” this is where it was going. The TALER Blockchain team that grew out of that community is the “Veyshnoria” side referenced throughout this page.

In August 2022, a Belarusian court ruled Veyshnoria’s social-media accounts and materials “extremist” - sadly in keeping with the post-2020 times.

Further reading: Wikipedia · Meduza - five years on · Astapova & Navumau, 2018.

March 2018: The Sanatorium Meeting

By late March 2018, the author of this account was already part of the TALER Blockchain team. A meeting was arranged in the sanatorium where the Creator was treating his leg. On one side: the Creator, Kornyshev (his associate from Vitebsk), and Rubilnik (owner of one of the mining pools). On the other side: three people from Veyshnoria, including the author.

A literal quote from the Creator during that meeting, still remembered word-for-word: “Can we mint some more premine?”

Veyshnoria asked for two things:

  1. A public report to the community of where the rest of the premine had gone (besides whatever was being handed over).
  2. A clear, working mechanism for transferring the premine.

It became clear that a significant portion of the premine had already been spent, and that for some reason the Creator was unwilling to transfer it all at once - only piecewise.

The Locked Wallet and the Disappearing 320,000 TLR

700,000 TLR was eventually transferred to Veyshnoria. The Creator claimed another 520,000 TLR was locked inside a wallet of his own - he had encrypted it and forgotten the password.

The stories around this got progressively wilder:

  • “My cat walked across the keyboard and password-locked the wallet.”
  • “I never made a backup of the wallet.”

In the course of working through this, it also surfaced that this was not the first wallet.dat he had reportedly lost. Another 150,000 TLR was supposedly “on a work computer, but I quit that job, and after I left they reinstalled the OS on the machine and everything was gone.”

After many rounds of accusations, dramas, and informal investigations, it turned out that there was a backup of the wallet - the Creator just didn’t know how to restore from it. (This is the man who proudly calls himself the Creator.) It was agreed that someone from the Veyshnoria side would visit him in person and help recover it.

Right before that scheduled visit, 200,000 TLR moved from the supposedly locked wallet to a Veyshnoria address - and another 320,000 TLR moved out to an unknown address. The Creator claimed he had nothing to do with it. He swore on everything, said he had even filed a police report about a theft. By that point nobody was buying it.

Summer 2018: The “Taler Business” Token and the Schism

Closer to summer 2018, the Creator began announcing the launch of a new “Taler Business” token on the Ethereum blockchain. By that point the smell of nonsense coming off the announcements was strong enough to come through a phone screen. The Veyshnoria side opened an information war in the public chat, asking pointed questions about the premine, resurfacing each of the prior stories, and demonstrating to the room that Taler Business was just another attempt to “sell air to businesses.”

The Creator tried to argue, then started banning everyone in his chat who asked uncomfortable questions. He still does this today - try going to his chat and asking, for example, where one can read the report on how the premine was actually spent.

This is when the project formally split into two camps:

  • “Creator camp” - led by Lavnikevich.
  • “Veyshnoria” - no formal leader; the loudest voice in the chats was the author of this account.

The dynamic is best summarized by the “Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man” meme, in which two identical figures shout at each other that they are the real one. (Or, equivalently, the current political situation in Belarus.)

Two Forks, Two Sites, and the “Next Generation”

The Veyshnoria side registered talercrypto.com, opened a Telegram channel at t.me/taler_crypto, and - since the original GitHub repository was controlled by us (the developer was on our side), while only taler.site was controlled by the Creator - rewrote every reference in the source code to point at the new site.

In response, the Creator camp forked the repository to github.com/TalerTeam/taler and patched the in-app GitHub links in their wallet to point at their fork. They also became extremely fond of describing themselves as “official.”

The war went on. Their attempts were consistently bad. A few that became running jokes:

  • A “bloK explorer” - yes, exactly that capitalization, on the homepage of their block explorer.
  • A “next-generation pool” - a stock NOMP deployment renamed “next-generation pool.” The phrase “next generation” became a sarcastic insult inside the community.

At some point an unknown party DDoS’d their “next-generation pool” to demonstrate at scale what they were. The pool stayed down for a long time.

10 February 2019: Hardfork to Hybrid PoW/PoS

Meanwhile, the Veyshnoria side prepared the next major hardfork - the migration from pure PoW to the hybrid PoW + PoS model that TALER still uses today.

The fork activated at block 130,000 on 10 February 2019. Because it was a hardfork, every exchange listing TALER had to update its wallet. Since exchange relations had always been handled by the Veyshnoria side, and since we held the original GitHub repository, we won that round decisively. At some point the Creator quietly conceded - his own site started linking to downloads of the forked wallet (ours).

Predictably, none of this helped the price.

A Third Camp: del espirit, SG, and taleronline

There was a third faction in this whole circus - del espirit and SG - running their own chat at t.me/taleronline. They are probably still in there pouring bile on both the Creator and Veyshnoria. It reads like a stream of pure spite. The author left that chat long ago - the regulars there appear to have made trash-talking everyone the entire purpose.

A snapshot of how the situation looked from the inside during the hot summer of 2018 is preserved here: Google Doc - TALER status report.

The Three-Team Snapshot (mid-2018)

By mid-2018, the project had publicly settled into a three-camp structure. A contemporary account written from the TalerOnline side (the third faction described above) summarized this as a “decentralization of the coin’s development.” It is reproduced below, with the caveat that it is TalerOnline’s framing - not a neutral history - and that the conflicts described in earlier sections are smoothed over in this version.

The “Veyshnoria” Team

After the premine transfer, the team got TALER listed on five exchanges, rebuilt the website / forum / social media, and turned the Veyshnoria virtual project itself into a working example of TALER Blockchain integration in a real web product.

Active members:

  • Alexander Lykshin - programmer
  • Oleg Larichev - manager
  • Ruslan Terminsky - manager
  • Nikolai - programmer, developer of the current TALER version
  • Valery Tereshko - system administrator
  • Andrey Maslov - web designer

Independent advisors: Roman Bleshchov, Dmitry Prosyanoy.

Resources controlled by this team:

  • The international project site TalerCrypto.com
  • The original GitHub repository
  • The TALER threads on bitcointalk.org
  • Profiles on Instagram, Twitter, VK, Facebook
  • Mining pool pool.vie.today
  • Telegram chats Taler Crypto and Taler Crypto ENG

Funding: the transferred premine and members’ own money.

Stated plans (as of mid-2018):

  1. A hardfork to increase transaction throughput by more than 5× and improve security.
  2. A campaign promoting TALER as a means of peer-to-peer settlement between individuals.
  3. Listings on additional exchanges, including Belarusian ones once they opened.
  4. Designing TALER Blockchain’s interaction with fiat electronic-payment systems.

The “Denis Lavnikevich” Team

About three months after the schism, Lavnikevich announced the creation of a separate Ethereum-based token called “Taler Business”, joined by Alexander Kornyshev who took on day-to-day delivery. The team continued to participate in the wider TALER Blockchain community.

Members:

  • Denis Lavnikevich - economic columnist, originator of the TALER idea
  • Igor “Rubilnik” - chat moderator
  • Alexander Kornyshev - socio-political activist
  • Denis Shman - programmer

Resources controlled by this team:

  • Site: taler.site
  • Blog: talercoin.by
  • Mining pool: pool.taler.club

Funding: members’ own money plus a portion of funds originally earmarked for the bounty program.

Stated plans:

  1. Build the Taler Pay payment system.
  2. Launch a YouTube blog.
  3. Issue “Taler Business” tokens on Ethereum.

The “TalerOnline” Team

Back when TALER had little more than a near-empty official site and a dead bitcointalk thread, enthusiasts SG and Rusl Ter built TalerOnline.com - at the time, the most complete public source of information about the coin: wallet guides, mining instructions, news, and so on. Programmer DeL Esprit later joined and built out the Telegram chats, price charts, services, and even mini-games with TALER Blockchain integration.

Members:

  • SG - project founder, content
  • DeL Esprit - programmer

Resources:

  • Independent blog about TALER: TalerOnline.com
  • Telegram chat TalerOnline.com
  • Marketplace: ads.taleronline.com
  • Mobile-airtime payment service, Telegram bots with price and statistics, online games, and a TALER faucet.

Funding: voluntary donations via TalerOnline.com/fund, with public expense reports.

The TalerOnline group framed the whole three-team setup as the natural state of an open-source coin, compared it to Bitcoin’s many parallel communities, and signed off with the line: “You yourself choose how to use the first Belarusian cryptocurrency, and whom to trust. TALER no longer has a single face whose mood can hold the project’s infrastructure hostage.”

Reading that paragraph against the rest of this page is left as an exercise for the reader.

After 2018: The Creator’s Later Career

  • The Creator emigrated to Kyiv.
  • He is also remembered, in earlier years, for literally interviewing his television set - a stunt that became one of the more lasting jokes about him in the local scene.
  • In October 2020, an investigation by Nasha Niva documented that he had spent roughly a decade fabricating “expert sources” for media outlets - inventing personas such as “Viktor Demidov” and “Vadim Dolinin” and attributing made-up political quotes to real people, including misattributed commentary about Belarusian opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. The fabricated commentary surfaced in publications including Open Media and Russia Today. See: nashaniva.by - the investigation.

All Three Teams Walked Away

By the early 2020s, none of the three teams from the snapshot above were actually running TALER any more. Each one quietly walked off the stage in its own way:

  • The Creator camp drifted apart as Lavnikevich relocated to Kyiv and shifted his focus elsewhere (see above).
  • The “Veyshnoria” team - the most active group in 2018–2019 - gradually scattered. People got new jobs, moved abroad, joined other crypto projects, or simply burned out after years of chat wars. The Veyshnoria meme itself being ruled “extremist” in 2022 did not exactly help.
  • TalerOnline (SG and DeL Esprit) also stopped maintaining anything in earnest. The chat is still online; the project is not.

What kept TALER going from that point on was not a team. It was a single developer - the cryptadev branch, covered next - quietly shipping releases on his own, plus the community itself: miners, holders, the people who kept nudging exchanges, the ones still running nodes and pools. No company, no “official” leadership, no premine left to argue over. Just the chain, the code, and whoever stayed.

That, honestly, is a big part of why the project survived at all.

After 2019: The Android Wallet Quietly Dies

The Android wallet that was almost ready in 2019 never shipped. It was eventually abandoned. The plan to migrate the GUI wallet onto a “classical” Bitcoin Core 0.17–style interface, by contrast, was delivered - and the resulting branch became the project’s central artifact for the next six years.

2020 → 2026: The 0.17 Era (cryptadev)

In March 2020, the single developer who had been quietly carrying the entire codebase shipped the “classical” Bitcoin Core-style wallet that had been promised since 2019. (Yes - for once, a thing that was promised actually came out.) The first 0.17 release-candidate arrived with automatic wallet backups, simpler defaults, and a less embarrassing PoS path.

Then - for half a decade - that one developer just kept the project alive on his own. No drama, no Spider-Man memes, no broken legs in sanatoriums. Just a series of small, unglamorous releases between 2020 and 2023 that cleaned up dependencies, made fees less of a circus, added per-address balance lookups, made the wallet portable, and quietly trimmed memory and CPU on large wallets. The community spent these years mostly watching the price chart, mining, and not setting fire to the chat.

The most recent release on this branch - 0.17.2.7 in March 2026 - refreshed the network seeds and tidied up the REST API. The 0.17 line is still actively maintained in parallel with 0.19, by the same developer who has been carrying it from the start.

The full release history lives at github.com/cryptadev/taler/releases. It is, by some distance, the calmest stretch in the page you are currently reading.

2025 → present: The 0.19 Era (abkvme)

In 2025 a new developer showed up - somehow not put off by the previous chapters of this document - branched off the 0.17 codebase, and started shipping a much more aggressive modernization line at github.com/abkvme/taler/releases. Today this is the most actively developed branch, and where most of the action lives.

The 0.19 wallet is not backward-compatible with 0.17 - once a wallet is migrated, there is no way back. The blockchain protocol itself is unchanged, however, so nodes from either branch happily talk to each other on the same network and pretend nothing happened. The two branches simply run in parallel.

Highlights so far:

  • November 2025. The first big release. Native Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3+) builds - finally - without Rosetta. Full Linux ARM64 support for Raspberry Pi and ARM servers. The internal wallet database got a long-overdue modernization, which is also the change that breaks wallet.dat compatibility - so for once a release note actually starts with “back up your wallet before upgrading.” New TALER icon, fresh DNS seeds on taler.tech, official multi-architecture Docker images, and a real CI/CD pipeline (which, on this project, almost qualifies as a luxury feature).
  • March 2026. Network and UX polish. A new Nodes page showing seeds and discovered peers with a built-in connectivity checker - so the question “is the network alive?” now has a button instead of a hunch. A new About / Info page with the project, explorer, and community links, since the previous answer was usually a forwarded screenshot. Missing translations filled in across all 33 supported languages - yes, the wallet now speaks 33 languages, none of which fix chat moderation.
  • April 2026. A proper staking UI lands on the Overview page: start/stop staking with a duration selector, live countdown, and auto-relock when the timer expires. Icons stop having a personal grudge against dark mode and finally render in theme-adaptive color across macOS, Windows and Linux. macOS builds were re-engineered to ship as fully self-contained binaries that no longer require Homebrew on the user’s machine (which used to cause exactly the “dyld: Library not loaded” error you would expect), with a sweeping modernization of every underlying dependency along for the ride.

Where Things Stand Today

The two branches - 0.17 (github.com/cryptadev/taler) and 0.19 (github.com/abkvme/taler) - run side by side on the same chain. Same protocol, same network, fully interoperable as peers. The split is in the wallet itself: 0.19 is a serious upgrade with no path back to 0.17 once a wallet is migrated. 0.19 is the active development track today; 0.17 is in maintenance.

In December 2025, the project also finally got a proper home: taler.tech - a single site that gathers everything in one place (including this very page you are reading), with full translations across English, Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian. After eight years and three feuding factions, TALER Blockchain has, at last, an address it isn’t embarrassed about.

In March 2026, a brand-new block explorer also went live at explorer.taler.tech - the first time the project has had a properly maintained explorer in a very long time.

A community Telegram remains open at t.me/talercommunity.

On the exchange side, TALER was recently added to Qutrade - trading pair: TLR/USDT. The first fresh listing in a long time.

The Coin That Refuses to Die

If you read this whole page in one sitting, you might reasonably conclude that TALER should not exist. There was a premine. There was a sanatorium. There was a cat on a keyboard. There were, by some count, three “official” teams shouting at each other in three Telegram chats, on top of a dead Android wallet and a price chart that has spent most of its life pointing one direction.

And yet - here we are. The chain still produces blocks. The wallet keeps shipping. The community is, somehow, still here.

TALER is the cryptocurrency equivalent of one of those neighborhood bars that has caught fire three times, been declared dead twice, lost half its regulars, and still - somehow - opens at noon. It fades, it gets reborn, it loses people and gains people, but it doesn’t die. The fans are still here. The chain is still alive. And - for all the absurdity recorded above - most of the interesting parts are arguably still ahead.

See you on the next block.

Links & Resources

A grab-bag of useful URLs - current project, historical sites that are still online, exchanges, and the articles cited above for further reading.

Where the project lives today:

Other explorers (older but still up):

Exchanges (TLR pairs):

Coin trackers:

Historical project sites, chats and socials (still online):

Articles and press:

Veyshnoria - further reading:

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