25 Centavos

Nicaragua's shift to chromium-plated steel coinage in the early 1990s was a direct consequence of the country's economic collapse under the Sandinista government, which had driven inflation to an annualized rate of over 33,000% by 1988. The córdoba oro, introduced in 1990 as a stabilization currency, anchored these new low-cost planchets to a restructured monetary system backed initially at parity with the US dollar.

The steel-core format was chosen explicitly to keep intrinsic metal value well below face value — a lesson learned painfully from earlier issues that had been melted or hoarded.