Which old online money let people trade for dollars, and who set daily prices?

Research question: Which online money services before bitcoin let people trade their units against dollars on an open market, and how were the prices for those units set day to day?

The records name e-gold, founded in 1996, as a digital gold currency whose units were denominated by weight of gold, so each unit was a claim on a set amount of physical gold ³⁵. The issuer did not itself exchange e-gold for other currencies; trading against dollars happened through private exchange offices, such as RUpay and ExchEngine in Russia, which converted e-gold to and from rubles ⁶⁷. The official rate of one XAU of e-gold in dollars rose from about $422.20 at the start of 2005 to about $633.50 by spring 2006 ⁸, but the facts do not explain how private exchangers set their day-to-day prices. Other services named include e-bullion, a digital-gold exchange that rose and then became defunct ¹, Gold Age, which is listed among digital gold exchanges ⁴, and Liberty Reserve, which the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York described as one of the world's largest digital currency companies ². The newest dated fact covers e-gold's 1996–2008 period ⁵, so it is roughly 18 years old as of October 2026.

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