20 Bolivianos

The Banco de la Nación Boliviana was established by law in 1911, replacing a chaotic landscape of private commercial banks that had each issued their own currency — a system that had produced rampant over-issuance and contributed to serious monetary instability in the preceding decades. This note belongs to the bank's inaugural series, making it an early product of Bolivia's attempt to centralize note-issuing authority under a single state institution.

ABNC's engraved work for Bolivian state clients during this period was consistently high quality, and the watermarked cotton stock was a deliberate step up from the paper standards many of the replaced private banks had used.