Stater

Kyzikos, positioned on the Propontis coast, dominated Black Sea trade routes during the sixth and fifth centuries BC, and its electrum staters functioned as the dominant international currency across the Greek world for well over a century — trusted precisely because the city's natural electrum supply from the Pactolus river system maintained a consistent gold-to-silver ratio that rival mints could not reliably replicate. Athenian tribute lists and shipwreck cargo evidence both confirm Kyzikenoi circulating far from their origin.

Von Fritze's cataloguing identified over a hundred distinct types within the series, each with a unique principal device — a deliberate policy that modern scholars believe was intended to aid counting and batch identification in large commercial transactions.