The legend struck on the Sikh coinage from 1765 and used through Ranjit Singh Ji's reign runs: Deg o tegh o fateh o nusrat-i-bedirang, yaft az Nanak Guru Gobind Singh. The cauldron, the sword, victory and ready help, obtained from Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh.
Degh is the cooking pot: the obligation to feed. Tegh is the sword: the obligation to defend. The two together are the formulation of what the Khalsa was supposed to be, and they are on the money.
It is a state motto that names no ruler and describes no territory, only two obligations and their source.
The phrase is still used. It appears on Nihang standards, in the Ardas tradition, and on the seal of Sikh organisations.
A currency whose legend commits the issuing power to feeding people is not a common arrangement in the history of money.
The couplet is in Persian, the language of currency and administration everywhere in the region, so a Khalsa coin declared its independence in the script and the tongue of the power it had displaced.
Jassa Singh Ahluwalia Ji struck the first of them at Lahore in 1765 after the Dal Khalsa took the city. The practice continued under the misls and into Ranjit Singh Ji's state, where the currency was still called Nanakshahi.
Refusing to put a ruler's name on the currency is a deliberate statement about where authority sits, and it survived the change from a confederacy to a monarchy.