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 too – 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 is likely in profit by roughly $24,300,000.

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.