100 000 000 Dollars Bearer Cheque

By mid-2008, Zimbabwe's month-on-month inflation had exceeded 11,000,000%, and the Reserve Bank had lost the capacity to issue notes fast enough to be useful. The "bearer cheque" format — technically a negotiable instrument rather than a banknote — was a legal workaround that allowed Fidelity Printers to push denominations into the hundreds of millions without formally restructuring the currency. It bought weeks, not months.

This 100,000,000-dollar instrument was obsolete almost immediately upon issue. The August 2008 redenomination slashed ten zeros from the currency, rendering the entire bearer cheque series worthless overnight.