Depavatan Croner
The Croner is the currency used in Depavata. The name stems from when the country was a kingdom, but today the currency is unique in that it is used without any sort of coins or bills. Even though efforts have been made to introduce it as the standard trading currency throughout the Southern Union, it has not been very easy in countries that use more traditional, physical means of payment.
As you could just go to the banks that now existed and turn in your gold for paper, almost all gold was now in the states possession while people just had papers to prove what they have.
But papers are easy to forge. No one wanted to deal with the cumbersome gold, but paper was not as trustworthy. This is when the High Council came up with what they thought was a genious idea: how about we just skip the paper slips and let the banks handle everything?
History
As with so much in society the history of the croner is shaped by war. The first mentions of the currency named croner shows up during the second war with Axarsú when the current king needed more resources to finance his army. He started loaning gold from the nobles, giving them bank papers as security that stated how much they had loaned him. These papers where adorned with the crown as a symbol for the royal family and started being referred to as croner from this.It is something quite ironic with giving the symbol of the king to the thing that utterly proves his incompetence and lack of fortune.
It didn't take long for these papers to start being used as payment in themselves, they were backed by the king after all. As a currency goes the history of the croner is quite uneventful until recently. Up until then the croner papers and gold itself had been used side by side and interchangeable, but people started to want papers rather than gold as it was way easier to handle, transport and secure.
How it Works
How their plan actually worked remains a mystery. Maybe it was the fear of thieves, robbers, forgers and similar. Maybe people were just used to the centralisation of everything that makes up Depavatan society. But the fact remains that it did work. Slowly but surely people started skipping using any sort of physical proof and instead drop by the bank once per day to fill in who and how much they owe, and who owes and how much to them. This of course means that the banks do a lot of work. Nowadays it is one of the sectors of society that employs the most people and courier dragons go back and forth between banks offices at all hours of the day.Influences
The introduction of the modern croner felt like a huge change when it was rolled out. People were used to having physical objects to trade with, it felt natural. But the fact is that trade itself changed very little. You are still trading the same thing after all, and stores and traders (at least the good ones) already kept books on all their trades. The only difference now was that the person buying had to keep track as well. But something people noticed fairly quickly was that it was actually easier to keep track of your money this way. You no longer ever just bought something because you had some change left. Another change was the introduction of personal book keepers. Used by mostly the richer part of the population, these servants follow their masters around when out and keeps track of all the purchases and makes sure to update the bank. This is of course only needed by people who do a lot of purchases.
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