Other associate members of the OECS do not use the Eastern Caribbean dollar as their official currency: the British Virgin Islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Officially, the British Virgin Islands used to use sterling, but in practice the situation was more complicated and involved the circulation of French francs and U.S. dollars.

British Guiana and Barbados had previously been members of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union but withdrew in 1966 and 1972, respectively.

Trinidad and Tobago had been a member of the earlier British West Indies currency union, but withdrew in 1964.

The combined population of the EC$ area is about 613,000 (2014 census and estimates[3][4]), which is comparable to Montenegro or the American capital city of Washington, D.C.

A few years later copper fractional dollars were coined for Mauritius, Sierra Leone, and the British West Indies.

The 1825 order-in-council was largely a failure because it made sterling silver coinage legal tender at the unrealistic rating in relation to the Spanish dollar of $1 = 4 shillings 4 pence.

In some of the Eastern Caribbean territories, notes were issued by various private banks, denominated in dollars equivalent to 4 shillings 2 pence.

In 1946, a West Indian Currency Conference saw Barbados, British Guiana, the Leeward Islands, Trinidad and Tobago and the Windward Islands agree to establish a unified decimal currency system based on a West Indian dollar to replace the current arrangement of having three different Boards of Commissioners of Currency (for Barbados (which also served the Leeward and Windward Islands), British Guiana and Trinidad & Tobago).

The symbol "BWI$" was frequently used and the currency was known verbally as the "Beewee" (slang for British West Indies) dollar.

In 1964 Jamaica ended the legal tender status of the BWI$[9] and Trinidad and Tobago withdrew from the currency union (adopting the Trinidad and Tobago dollar) forcing the movement of the headquarters of the BCCB to Barbados[6] and soon the "BWI$" dollar lost its regional support.

The EC$ is now issued by the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, based in the city of Basseterre, in Saint Kitts and Nevis.

The effigy of Queen Elizabeth II was also changed that same year on all coin denominations to the Ian Rank-Broadley design, making it the last commonwealth currency up to that date to discontinue the Arnold Machin portrait.

[10] In 1965, the Eastern Caribbean Currency Authority issued banknotes in denominations of 1, 5, 20 and 100 dollars, all featuring Pietro Annigoni's 1956 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in regalia of the Order of the Garter.

[12] In 2012, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank issued a series of banknotes with Braille features in an effort to provide notes which are easier for blind and visually impaired persons to use.

The raised Braille characters on the upgraded notes feature a cricket theme in the form of balls and stumps.

[13][14][15] In 2019, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank introduced a new family of notes produced in polymer substrate and presented in a vertical format.

[16] The 2012 issue included raised braille elements for the visually-impaired in the form of a cricket ball and stumps.