10 Dollars

Zimbabwe's third attempt at a functional dollar in roughly a decade, this note belongs to the "RTGS Dollar" series introduced after the Reserve Bank tried to phase out the bond note fiction that had persisted since 2019. The RTGS Dollar was itself absorbed into the Zimbabwe Dollar by mid-2020, meaning notes from this series had an exceptionally brief official mandate before the nomenclature shifted again — though they remained in circulation regardless of what the government was calling the currency that month.

Giesecke+Devrient's hybrid substrate contract for Zimbabwe reflects how seriously the Reserve Bank took counterfeiting risk, given the country's history of informal currency substitution whenever confidence collapsed.