Learn / Famous finds and records
Record-breaking gold coins and bars
A one-tonne coin, a 100-kilogram Maple Leaf, a 250-kilogram bar you can touch and the most expensive coin ever sold. The heavyweight records of gold.
The one-tonne coin
The Australian Kangaroo One Tonne Gold Coin, made by the Perth Mint in 2011 and unveiled in 2012, is recognized as the largest and heaviest gold coin ever made.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Gold content | About 1,000 kilograms of 99.99 percent gold |
| Diameter | About 80 centimeters |
| Thickness | About 12 centimeters |
| Face value | 1 million Australian dollars |
| Design | A red kangaroo on one side |
Its gold value is many times its face value. The coin was made by casting and then engraving, and it has been displayed at the Perth Mint. Its legal face value is purely symbolic; nobody spends it.
The Big Maple Leaf
In 2007, the Royal Canadian Mint made the Big Maple Leaf, a 100-kilogram coin of 99.999 percent gold (five nines), with a face value of 1 million Canadian dollars. It is about 50 centimeters across and 3 centimeters thick. At the time, it was the largest gold coin ever made, before the Perth Mint's one-tonne coin. The Mint produced a small number of these coins.
One of them, on loan to the Bode Museum in Berlin, was stolen in a night-time break-in in March 2017. It was never recovered and is widely believed to have been cut up or melted. The case led to convictions and drew worldwide attention to museum security.
The largest gold bar
A 250-kilogram gold bar made in Japan by Mitsubishi Materials was certified by Guinness World Records in 2005 as the world's largest gold bar. It has been displayed at a gold mine museum in Toi, on the Izu Peninsula, where visitors could reach into a case and touch it. Its value rises and falls with the gold price, and at recent prices it has been worth tens of millions of dollars.
The most expensive coin ever sold
The 1933 Double Eagle is a US $20 gold coin. Nearly all of the 1933 mintage was melted down after the United States changed its gold policy in 1933 (see the gold standard), and only a handful survive. Only one is legal for private ownership. That coin sold at auction in 2021 for about $18.9 million, making it the most valuable coin ever sold at auction at the time.
Other coins have sold for millions because of their rarity and history, including the Brasher Doubloon, an early American gold coin from 1787. Their value comes from history and scarcity, not from their few grams of gold.
Big ordinary bars
For comparison, the standard bars of the wholesale market:
| Bar | Gold content |
|---|---|
| London Good Delivery bar | About 400 troy ounces (12.4 kg) |
| Kilobar | 1 kilogram (32.15 troy ounces) |
| 10 tola bar | About 3.75 ounces (116.6 grams), popular in South Asia and the Gulf |
A Good Delivery bar is about the size of a house brick but weighs as much as a small child. Central bank vaults, such as those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England, hold hundreds of thousands of these bars. See fineness and purity marks.
Smallest gold coins
At the other extreme, mints issue tiny bullion coins such as 1/10 ounce and 1/20 ounce sizes, and some special issues weigh as little as half a gram. Small coins carry much higher premiums per gram because the cost of making them is spread over very little gold. See bid, ask and premiums.
Gold's density means the one-tonne coin, although enormous for a coin, could fit into a small car trunk if it were a different shape. A cubic meter of gold would weigh about 19.3 tonnes.
For the coins people actually collect and buy, see the bullion coin comparison.
