2000 Tenge Qanysh Satbaev 125 years

Qanysh Satbaev, born in 1899, was the Soviet geologist who identified the Zhezkazgan copper deposit as one of the largest on earth — a finding that shaped Kazakhstan's entire industrial trajectory through the Soviet period and beyond. He became the first president of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences in 1946, a position he used to build scientific infrastructure in a republic that had almost none.

The tantalum ring is not decorative ambition — Kazakhstan holds significant tantalum reserves, and the National Bank has used the metal deliberately in several recent bimetallic issues as a statement of domestic resource wealth.