100 Sucres Antonio José de Sucre

Antonio José de Sucre, the Venezuelan-born general who secured Ecuadorian independence at the Battle of Pichincha in 1822, lent his name to Ecuador's currency for over a century before dollarization ended it in 2000. By 1995, inflation had so badly eroded the sucre's purchasing power that a 100-sucre coin — worth fractions of a U.S. cent by the decade's end — was essentially a rounding unit. The shift to bimetallic construction reflects the monetary instability of the period; higher-denomination coins required cheaper production methods to justify their existence at all.