Frequently Asked Questions

TALER (ticker TLR) is a hybrid Proof-of-Work / Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency originally launched in 2017. The codebase is a Bitcoin Core fork using the Lyra2Z mining algorithm, with PoS activated at block 130,000 in February 2019. It is positioned in community lore as “the first Belarusian cryptocurrency.”

The first transaction occurred on 13 September 2017 and the project was publicly announced on 6 October 2017. The chain was originally created on walletbuilders.com — a service that lets anyone produce a Litecoin clone in minutes — and started life on the scrypt algorithm before forking to Lyra2Z.

Two people: Denis Lavnikevich (an economic columnist) and Lavrinenko (an IT manager). They allocated themselves a 10% premine — 2,333,333 TLR — at genesis. By February 2018 both publicly announced they were leaving the project; what actually happened, the controversies around the premine, and the schism that followed are documented in detail on the history page.

No. By the early 2020s all three of the original 2018 camps (Lavnikevich’s “Creator camp,” the Veyshnoria team, and TalerOnline) had effectively walked away. Since then the chain has been carried by independent developers plus the community — miners, stakers, exchange operators, and people running nodes. There is no company, no foundation, no premine left to argue over.

Veyshnoria is a fictional country invented in July 2017 for the Russian–Belarusian Zapad-2017 military exercise. The Belarusian internet adopted it as a civic meme — an idealized Belarus, complete with a flag, anthem, e-passports, and a claimed national currency: TALER. That association is why the name keeps appearing in TALER Blockchain’s history. In August 2022 a Belarusian court ruled Veyshnoria’s social-media accounts and materials “extremist.”

• Blocks 0–9,999: scrypt (the original launch algorithm)
• Blocks 10,000+: Lyra2Z — a memory-hard, ASIC-resistant PoW algorithm

The hardfork to Lyra2Z happened at block 10,000 on 24 November 2017, after Chinese ASIC operators took over most of the scrypt hashrate.

Both. PoW has run since genesis; PoS was activated at block 130,000 on 10 February 2019. PoW and PoS blocks coexist on the same chain — each with its own difficulty target and block-spacing target (60 seconds for PoW, 140 seconds for PoS).

23,333,333 TLR, with a smallest unit of 0.00000001 TLR. The genesis premine was 2,333,283 TLR (~10%). As of March 2026, circulating supply is approximately 19.5 million TLR.

Since the PoS activation at block 130,000, each PoW block reward is split 70% to the miner / 30% to staking, and the PoS subsidy is calculated as PoS_reward = PoW_reward × 30 / 70.

Every 1,050,000 PoW blocks (~2.5 years). Four halvings have occurred. Current rewards (as of March 2026):

• PoW: 0.4375 TLR per block
• PoS: 0.1875 TLR per block

The fifth halving is expected around December 2027.

• P2PKH (Base58): addresses begin with T
• P2SH (Base58): prefix byte 50
• Bech32 (SegWit): human-readable prefix tlr (e.g. tlr1q...)
• Extended public keys: standard BIP32 HD derivation

23153. Protocol version is 70020.

From the actively developed branch on GitHub: github.com/abkvme/taler/releases. Builds are available for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux x86_64, and Linux ARM64.

Both branches run on the same chain — same protocol, same network, fully interoperable as nodes.

• 0.17 (cryptadev/taler) — long-running maintenance line. Quietly carried the project alone from 2020 to 2026. Latest release: 0.17.2.7 (March 2026). Still actively maintained in parallel.
• 0.19 (abkvme/taler) — modern, aggressively updated branch started in 2025. Native Apple Silicon and Linux ARM64 builds, modern wallet database, multi-arch Docker images, full CI/CD, staking UI, theme-adaptive icons, 33 languages.

The 0.19 wallet is not backward compatible with 0.17 — once a wallet.dat is migrated, there is no way back. The blockchain itself is unchanged, so the two branches just talk to each other on the network.

For new users: 0.19. It has native Apple Silicon support, modern builds, and the active development. Use 0.17 only if you have a specific reason to stay on the older branch (such as an existing 0.17 wallet you do not want to migrate). Always back up wallet.dat before upgrading to 0.19, since the wallet database modernization is one-way.

No. An Android wallet was almost shipped in 2019 and was eventually abandoned. There is currently no official mobile wallet.

No. A new TALER Coin wallet stores private keys in plaintext until you explicitly encrypt it. Encrypt your wallet via Settings → Encrypt Wallet (or taler-cli encryptwallet "passphrase"). The encryption uses AES-256-CBC with an SHA-512–derived key, and a strong passphrase (20+ characters) is strongly recommended.

Close taler-qt, then copy wallet.dat to a secure location (encrypted external drive, encrypted cloud container, etc.). Test the backup by restoring it on a separate system before relying on it. There is no “forgot password” — losing both the wallet file and its passphrase means your coins are permanently gone.

Your coins are permanently lost. No company, developer, or authority can restore them. This is the same trade-off as Bitcoin: you control the keys, and that control comes with full responsibility.

Yes. PoW uses Lyra2Z, which is memory-hard and historically GPU/CPU friendly. There are several community-run pools; check the current list of seed nodes and pools at taler.tech and on the Nodes page in the wallet.

20 blocks (coinbase maturity).

Staking weight follows the formula:

weight = min(age_in_days, 99) × min(value_in_TLR, 9999)

Practical implications:

• Coins must be unspent for at least 2 days to begin staking
• Age stops contributing past 90 days (hard cap at 99 days)
• A single UTXO contributes at most 9,999 TLR of value to its weight — splitting very large balances across multiple UTXOs can therefore stake more efficiently

In the 0.19 wallet, the Overview page has a built-in staking control: choose a duration, click start, and the wallet keeps the wallet unlocked for the chosen window with a live countdown and auto-relock. The wallet must be running, online, and unlocked for staking to occur.

For the original scrypt phase, yes — Chinese ASIC operators dominated the early hashrate. After the 2017 fork to Lyra2Z, the chain has remained largely ASIC-resistant in practice.

• Block explorer: explorer.taler.tech — the primary, actively maintained explorer (live since March 2026)
• Other explorers (older but still up): explorer.talercoin.org, explorer.talercrypto.com
• In-wallet Nodes page: the 0.19 wallet has a built-in seeds / peers / connectivity checker

Currently active TLR trading pairs include:

• Qutrade — TLR/USDT (most recent listing)
• BTC-Trade
• Richamster — TLR/BTC
• Bololex — TLR/USDT
• OCCE — TLR/BTC

Lower-volume venues such as Crex24 and STEX also list TLR. Always check the live volume before relying on a particular pair.

The active community Telegram is t.me/talercommunity. News and historical channels are also still active (see Links).

Active development happens on the 0.19 branch. Recent releases have focused on Apple Silicon and Linux ARM64 support, a modern wallet database, multi-architecture Docker images, the in-app Nodes page, the staking UI, and a sweeping macOS dependency rebuild that removed the Homebrew runtime requirement. Future direction is determined by the developers actually writing the code, not by a marketing roadmap. Follow github.com/abkvme/taler/releases.

Yes — 2,333,283 TLR (~10% of max supply) was mined into the genesis block in 2017 by the original founders. They publicly promised it would be distributed to participating businesses for free; in practice no community member has ever come forward to confirm receiving any of it. Years of disputes, partial transfers, a “locked” wallet with a missing password, and 320,000 TLR mysteriously moving to an unknown address are all covered on the history page.

The original 2017–2018 founders’ management of the premine remains, charitably, controversial — and the project’s first years were a sequence of public fights between three competing factions. That TALER Blockchain is gone. The chain that exists today is a community-run open-source project with no central team, no premine left to allocate, and developers shipping code in public on GitHub. Treat it as exactly what it is: a small, long-running cryptocurrency you can audit yourself, not a managed business.

Cryptocurrencies in Belarus are governed by Presidential Decree No. 8 (signed December 2017, in force from 28 March 2018) and subsequent regulations. TALER itself has no special legal status. The Veyshnoria meme — historically intertwined with TALER Blockchain — was ruled “extremist” by a Belarusian court in August 2022, but that ruling concerned Veyshnoria’s social-media accounts and materials, not the TALER Blockchain. Consult local counsel for your jurisdiction.

Because the chain still produces blocks, the wallet still ships, exchanges still list it, and the community is still here. After eight years, three feuding factions, a premine drama, an abandoned mobile wallet, and a price chart that has spent most of its life pointing one direction, TALER Blockchain has settled into something quietly stable: a small, open-source, community-maintained blockchain — and one of the more colourful stories in the history of post-Soviet crypto.