Ukrainian Politician Discloses Owning $24M in Privacy Coin Monero

Rostislav Solod, a member of the city council in the town of Kramatorsk, Ukraine, has reported owning millions of dollars worth of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency monero (XMR).

In a declaration of all the property he owns and has access to – an anti-corruption procedure for all public officials in Ukraine – Solod listed, alongside real estate, cars and stock, 185,000 XMR. That's an amount worth $24,375,600 at press time, according to CoinMarketCap data.

According to the publicly available document, he bought the coins in December 2015, when the price of the cryptocurrency fluctuated between $0.30 and $0.50. So the holdings would likely have cost Solod somewhere around $74,000 at that time (based on a price of $0.40). With XMR's price around $132 currently, he has likely profited by roughly $24,300,000.

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Solod became a city hall member after an election this autumn. His parents, Yuri Solod and Natalia Korolevska, are members of the national parliament of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada.

Ukraine passed its first draft bill on digital assets in the first hearing in early December. Both Yuri Solod and Natalia Korolevska were absent during the vote.