1 Dollar Yellow Damsel

Palau's dollar series featuring marine life began in the 1990s as a deliberate revenue mechanism — the coins are legal tender but were never intended for circulation, produced entirely for the collector market at a time when small Pacific island nations were increasingly licensing their sovereign minting rights to European producers, typically the Bavarian State Mint or Berne-based houses.

The Yellow Damselfish issues from this era were struck with color-printing technology applied directly to the coin face, a technique that was still generating collector novelty in 2008 before the market became saturated with similar products from Niue, Tuvalu, and the Cook Islands.