On 20 February, the Government of Zimbabwe introduced a new currency, known as the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) dollar, which merges the surrogate bond note and electronic dollars; local bond notes were issued in 2016 to ease currency shortages and were officially traded at parity to the US dollar. By contrast, the RTGS dollar is based floating exchange rate system and its initial rate was set at 2.5 per US dollar, effectively implying devaluation of the local currency, in attempt to align the value with the parallel market rate. The introduction of the RTGS is intended to curb the shortage of foreign exchange in the country that has pushed year-on-year inflation rate to 57 percent in January, the highest rate since 2008, and eliminate the multi-pricing system that had previously prevailed.