1/10 Balboa

Panama has no central bank and issues no paper currency of its own — the U.S. dollar circulates as legal tender alongside Panamanian coinage, a monetary arrangement dating to the 1904 Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty signed just months after independence from Colombia. The balboa exists purely as coin, never note, which means fractional pieces like this one absorbed genuine daily circulation pressure across nearly three decades.

The shift to copper-nickel clad in this series mirrored the U.S. Mint's own compositional changes of the mid-1960s, driven by the global silver shortage that had made silver coinage economically untenable.