February 14, 2019 – After four decades of innovation and commercial success, the Royal Canadian Mint has launched a special 40th anniversary edition of the Gold Maple Leaf, celebrating the bullion coin that the global precious metal industry has come to accept as the standard against which other gold bullion coins are measured.
The 40th anniversary edition of the Gold Maple Leaf is limited to a world-wide mintage of 15,000 pieces.
When it began in 1979 as a trial project to transform Canadian gold into pure gold investment coins, few could have predicted the runaway success and staying power of the highly-acclaimed Gold Maple Leaf bullion coin, with nearly 30 million ounces sold to date. Forty years later, it is the world’s favourite gold bullion coin, with multiple benchmarks to its credit, such as unsurpassed purity, laser micro-engraving and Bullion DNA anti-counterfeiting technology. The Mint will started shipping this limited edition, 1 oz., 99.99% pure gold coin to official bullion distributors in February of 2019.
“The Royal Canadian Mint is extremely proud to have distinguished itself as a global market leader by consistently raising the bar on the purity and security of its Gold Maple Leaf bullion coin”, said Jennifer Camelon, Interim President and CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint.?“Our 40th anniversary Gold Maple Leaf is also a tribute to the talent and ingenuity of our people, who made it possible for the Mint to offer world’s best gold bullion coin to our customers.”
In celebration of a truly Canadian success story, the special 40th anniversary Gold Maple Leaf coin is entirely crafted from gold responsibly sourced from Canadian mines. Its reverse features an intricate engraving of the signature Walter Ott-designed sugar maple leaf intertwined with the number 40, highlighted by contrasting finishes. The familiar obverse, distinguished by the Susanna Blunt effigy of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, is double-dated 1979-2019.
Like the 99.99% pure Gold Maple Leaf bullion coin that it honours, the anniversary coin has a distinct finish consisting of an array of precisely machined radial lines and its reverse features a micro-engraved maple leaf-shaped security containing the number 19, to denote its year of issue.
Find more information about the Maple Leaf in our little encyclopedia of bullion coins.
For some years a Maple Leaf was the largest coin of the world.
We all know what happened to the Berlin specimen of these “Big Maple Leafs”.
You want to know more about the Canadian gold mines? Here are some nice photos of the Canadian Gold Rush of 1858.