The Currency Symbols block is, by Unicode standards, very small: 48 codepoints allocated in a 64-position window from U+20A0 to U+20CF. But its inhabitants are responsible for the unit prices on every shop receipt outside the dollar-sterling-yen zone, and they include some of Unicode's most-watched additions — characters whose acceptance into the standard tracked the political and economic history of the last three decades.
About this block
The currency symbols inherited from earlier eight-bit codepages — $ DOLLAR SIGN (U+0024), ¢ CENT SIGN (U+00A2), £ POUND SIGN (U+00A3), ¥ YEN SIGN (U+00A5), and the generic ¤ CURRENCY SIGN (U+00A4) — do not live here. They sit in Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement, where they were already encoded by ISO 8859 and earlier standards. The Currency Symbols block exists for everything that came later.
Among the most consequential additions: U+20AC EURO SIGN €, added in Unicode 2.1 in 1998, ahead of the euro's physical introduction in 2002. The Indian rupee sign U+20B9 ₹ joined in Unicode 6.0 (2010) after the Government of India ran a public design competition. The Turkish lira sign U+20BA ₺ followed in Unicode 6.2 (2012). The Bitcoin sign U+20BF ₿ was added in Unicode 10.0 (2017), making it the first major cryptocurrency to receive a dedicated codepoint. Each addition required a formal proposal documenting the symbol's design history, official adoption by a national authority or recognized standards body, and existing print use.
Other notable inhabitants include the Israeli new shekel U+20AA ₪, the Vietnamese dong U+20AB ₫, the Cambodian riel U+17DB ៛ (which lives in the Khmer block — not all currency signs are here), the Thai baht U+0E3F ฿ (in the Thai block), the Korean won U+20A9 ₩, the Nigerian naira U+20A6 ₦, the Filipino peso U+20B1 ₱, the Russian ruble U+20BD ₽ (added in Unicode 7.0 in 2014 after years of design debate), the Georgian lari U+20BE ₾, and the Bangladeshi taka U+09F3 ৳ (in the Bengali block). The split between "currency symbols block" and "script-specific block" follows whether the symbol is treated by its host script as a letter-like form or as a standalone currency mark.
The block is sparsely populated: only about 48 of its 64 reserved positions are filled in Unicode 16.0, leaving room for future currencies. The Unicode Consortium will not assign a codepoint to a speculative or unofficial currency mark; proposals require national-bank or international-standards backing, which is why no character exists for "Ethereum" or "Dogecoin" despite many community designs. Bitcoin was the exception, accepted only after years of mainstream use and after the symbol appeared in established print typography.