Focus Country

Yesterday the Royal Canadian Mint announced that they had struck some huge gold coins. I mean very, very large. At 21 inches or 53 centimeters across and with a thickness of 1.2 inches or three centimeters, I think this is the biggest coin ever struck! There are plenty of stories in the Canadian press as well as the U.S., Indian and New Zealand press. One of the ones I read at Canada.Com with Canadian Press credit, had an excellent perspective image with Sanjay Gupta, CEO of Shirpur Gold Refinery Ltd taking a good close look. Just imagine the press power it must have taken to strike this thing!

British Colonial enthusiast and writer, Aidan Work applied the term "Coinzilla" to this new mammoth effort and I think it fits very nicely! Word from Aidan is that "There's been a report of 10 pieces having been struck of the Coinzilla with 3 of them having being sold so far at C$3,000,000 each,even though their denomination is C$1,000,000!". Yahoo News mentioned that this new denomination only came about through an amendment to the Canadian currency act. But that's the fun of it, this is the largest denomination coin in the wolrd. In fact, I'm pretty sure this carries a larger denomination that any banknote in circulation as well.

• Melt value, using todays london pm fix, would be about $1,822,565 in U.S. dollars.
• Face value is $1,000,000 Canadian, or about $900,000 in U.S. dollars.
• Reported sale price is $3,000,000 Canadian, or about $2,700,000 in U.S. dollars.

While that may seem like a healthy profit, remember that the Royal Canadian Mint engineers had to develop the technology to strike a coin of this size. I am sure that was no small task! The press they got from this is not small either and I am sure this was part of their mission, as this coin and all the new Maple Leaf series are moving to a five digit fineness at .99999 fine. That's about as close to pure as you're going to get.