How to print your own micronation currency

What is currency?

Money has taken many forms throughout history and around the world, from cowrie shells, copper ingots, rum, and gold coins in the past to colorful pieces of paper or polymer and digital bank records today. What connects these various forms of money is not their physical characteristics, but the function they serve: each was trusted in its era as a reliable way to pay or be paid, to quote prices, and to store value over time. To put it another way, they were a:

widely accepted payment method

unit of account

storage of value

These three characteristics are the standard definition of what makes something "money".

Designing currency

Assume we're designing a banknote. First, decide on a theme for the banknote. This could include plants, animals, transportation, landmarks in your micronation, and so on. After deciding on the banknote denomination, you should choose a watermark and/or hologram security threads. Then incorporating the theme, design illustrations to include. I recommend using Adobe Illustrator, although Inkscape is free and works well as well.

20 Ice Mark bank note from Westarctica
Image credit: Encyclopedia Westarctica

If graphic design is not your strength, there are graphic designers within the micronational community who can help. Try politely asking around Facebook groups or Discord servers and someone might help. If you have money to spare (actual money), Fiverr and Freelancer.com are good places to look too.

Printing the currency

How do other micronations print money?

The most commonly printed currency for micronations is coins. I asked some of the largest micronations in the community, and here are their recommendations for sites to buy personalised coins from. These would mostly be useful only for souvenirs or as a novelty, as they would likely not catch on as a reliable way to pay or be paid.

The Lehmark Imperial Florin coins, printed by Ties N' Cuffs

For printing bank notes, there are far fewer resources available compared to coins. If security features are not included in the design, notes could be printed on glossy flyer paper or even normal white copy paper. A more pricy but realistic option is to print onto rag paper, which is what a lot of other currencies use and can easily be purchased online. You can also make your own.

Alternatives

Often for newer micronations, physically printing currency is prohibitively expensive. Most printing shops have minimum ordering requirements that are only practical for micronations with thousands of supporters. So what is the alternative?

A very popular option is creating a cryptocurrency. As technology advances each year, making new cryptocurrencies becomes more and more accessible to people who have never dabbled in this field before. There are numerous tutorials on creating Stellar tokens, using the Ethereum blockchain and more. This also costs money, so whatever option you go with, you are going to have to fork out some cash.

You could also adopt an existing cryptocurrency token as the national currency, this would be beneficial as it would already have value, and this would increase/decrease the value of the national currency automatically.

Got ideas for other alternatives? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The Micronationalist

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