100 Lei

Moldova's first post-Soviet banknote series was introduced in 1992 when the country abandoned the Soviet ruble and issued the Moldovan leu as its sovereign currency. The 100 Lei note belongs to that founding series, which remained in print across two decades — an unusually long run that reflects both fiscal conservatism and the printing infrastructure constraints faced by a newly independent state with no established central bank tradition.

The series was printed by the Canadian Bank Note Company in Ottawa, one of several foreign security printers contracted by former Soviet republics scrambling to establish independent currencies in the early 1990s.