WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History marks the upcoming 10-year anniversary of the opening of its signature exhibition, “The Value of Money,” by featuring several updates and showcasing extensive new content and acquisitions. This long-term exhibition in the museum’s Innovation Wing explores the National Numismatic Collection—one of the Smithsonian’s oldest and most treasured collections.

Beginning Dec. 6, behind the massive vault door entrance, the new entryway features diverse objects spanning more than 4,000 years from ancient cuneiform tablets to modern money. Throughout the gallery, visitors will see some of the collection’s most recent acquisitions, including an IRS agent’s laptop that helped the U.S. government confiscate $3.6 billion of stolen cryptocurrency in 2022, resulting in the largest financial seizure in U.S. history. Another addition, Chinese coins from the Howard F. Bowker Collection, looks at the history of money in China. A new changing display case features “Revolutionary Money,” highlighting the wide range of objects in circulation in early America, such as a beaver pelt, colonial and European coins, and Continental banknotes.

Popular objects, among the rarest in the world, continue to delight visitors, including the legendary “1933 Double Eagle,” the first U.S. $20 gold coin from 1849, a $100,000 bill printed in 1934 and the famous 1804 silver dollars known as “the king of coins.”

“The Value of Money” connects American history to global histories of exchange, innovation, political change and cultural interaction and expression through more than 300 objects from the museum’s National Numismatic Collection. Thematically organized into five sections, the exhibition allows visitors to learn about the origins of money, new monetary technologies, the political and cultural messages money conveys, numismatic art and design and the practice of collecting money.

“This exhibition allows visitors to explore history through some of the rarest and most diverse numismatic objects in the world,” said Ellen Feingold, curator of the exhibition.” “With ‘The Value of Money,’ we showcase monetary objects that are relevant to our visitors’ lives from cryptocurrency to foreign affairs.”