Mint XXI launch their first tranche of numismatics for 2022, and the quality is as high as ever. An early video look.

Mint XXI are back with their first group of coins for 2022, and it’s another fine mix of art, myth, and nature, with a little bit of modern cryptocurrency thrown in. As we did with CIT’s new Winter Launch a few days ago, we’ll take a quick look at the range using the mints own, and quite excellent, videos, as well as a better look at one released last week, the Liberty Bitcoin.

The main group of six coins are a mix of two and three ounce issues, with the solitary kilo coin being a bigger version of their existing ‘Three Graces’ design from 2021. The three ounce pair consists of a striking ‘Helios’ design, with gilding and what looks like an amber or resin insert, and a ‘Whore of Babylon’ coin with a very distinctive artistic style. The three, two-ounce coins are a more varied mix. A ‘Tiger Mandala’ looks good, there’s a neat ‘Mantis’ coin giving us a close-up of these amazing insects, and an elegant ‘Abduction of Europa’ coin, the third of this grouping to feature nudes. We’re particularly pleased to see so much variety of design on the obverse faces, as only one of them has a standard appearance, with the rest greatly enhanced through theming.

We’ll take a better look at these new coins in the coming weeks, but for now, the ‘Liberty Bitcoin’ will be our main focus. A one-ounce silver coin, it combines a classic female personification on its reverse face, something the coin world does so well, with an obverse designed around the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Liberty herself is well rendered, even managing to employ radiating lines in the background field that actually enhance the coin’s aesthetics (we find most quite distracting).

The obverse is full of fictional items, namely a dragon and a unicorn, but pride of place is reserved for a holographic image, behind which is a Bitcoin sticker holding a nominal crypto value. It’s all part of the so-called ‘United Crypto States’, which you can read more about on the coin’s dedicated website. I’m no crypto fan, to be honest, but there’s no denying that huge numbers of people are, so there’s certainly appeal for something like this. For me, it has a good coin design, and treated like a round, is certainly one of the nicer examples of the genre. Kudos to Mint XXI for trying something new, and we’ll see how collectors take to it. Packaging looks neat, and this 40 mm diameter coin is struck to a proof finish. It appears to have no mintage limit.