10 000 Tenge

Kazakhstan established its own banknote printing facility in Almaty in 1997, making it one of the few post-Soviet republics to achieve fully domestic production within a decade of independence. This 10,000 tenge note, the highest denomination in the 2003 series, was printed there rather than contracted to the usual European security printers that neighboring republics still depended on. The security package — watermark and thread — is relatively modest for a note of this face value, reflecting the denomination's limited everyday role in an economy where this sum represented roughly $70 at time of issue.