SEPTEMBER 24
2020•American Eagle Palladium
2026•Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle Tribute
The First Uncirculated American Palladium Eagle Goes on Sale
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At noon Eastern Daylight Time on September 24, 2020, the United States Mint opened sales of the first American Palladium Eagle with an uncirculated collector finish. The release completed an unusual four-year sequence for the young palladium program: bullion in 2017, proof in 2018, reverse proof in 2019, and uncirculated in 2020.
The coin contained one troy ounce of 99.95 percent pure palladium, carried a $25 legal-tender denomination, and was struck at the West Point Mint with a W mint mark. Production was limited to just 10,000 coins.
Yet the 2020 issue was more than another precious-metal American Eagle. Its designs reached deep into American numismatic history. Both sides revived work by sculptor Adolph A. Weinman: the famous Winged Liberty portrait from the 1916 Mercury dime on the obverse and an eagle design created for the American Institute of Architects in 1907 on the reverse.
Palladium Joins the American Eagle Family
The American Eagle program began in 1986 with gold and silver bullion coins. Platinum joined the family in 1997.
Palladium came much later.
Congress authorized an American Palladium Eagle in 2010, but the law required the Treasury to study whether sufficient market demand existed before committing to the program. Years of development followed.
The first American Palladium Eagle bullion coins finally appeared in 2017.
That made palladium the fourth major precious metal represented in the American Eagle program after gold, silver, and platinum.
Palladium is a silvery-white precious metal in the platinum-group family.
It is rarer in the Earth’s crust than many more familiar metals and has important industrial uses, particularly in catalytic converters and other applications requiring its chemical properties.
Unlike gold and silver, palladium had little historical role in traditional United States circulating coinage.
Its appearance in an official American Eagle therefore represented something genuinely modern: a federal precious-metal coin built around a metal better known to industry and commodity markets than to generations of everyday coin users.
The 2017 Bullion Debut
The first American Palladium Eagles were bullion coins released in 2017.
Bullion American Eagles are primarily investment products. The Mint distributes them through a network of authorized purchasers rather than selling ordinary bullion issues directly to the public in the same manner as its numismatic collector products.
The palladium coin contained one ounce of .9995 fine palladium and carried a $25 face value.
Its precious-metal value was—and remains—far more important economically than its legal-tender denomination.
The 2017 launch established the basic design that has continued throughout the program.
The Mint did not commission entirely new artwork for the palladium coin.
Instead, it turned to Adolph A. Weinman, one of the most celebrated artists in American coinage history.
Weinman created two of the great designs introduced during the artistic renaissance of U.S. coinage in 1916: the Mercury dime and Walking Liberty half dollar.
The Palladium Eagle combines Weinman imagery that had never originally appeared together on a coin.
The obverse uses a high-relief version of Weinman’s Winged Liberty portrait from the Mercury dime.
The familiar nickname “Mercury dime” is technically a misidentification. The figure is Liberty, not the Roman god Mercury.
Her winged cap was intended to symbolize liberty of thought.
The portrait proved so memorable that the nickname became permanent in American numismatic language.
On the Palladium Eagle, the design appears at a much larger scale than on the tiny dime, allowing Weinman’s modeling to be appreciated in a new way.
The Reverse Comes From a Medal
The reverse has an even more unusual origin.
It is based on Weinman’s reverse for the 1907 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.
The design depicts an eagle perched on a rock and grasping a branch.
Before the Palladium Eagle program, the image belonged primarily to medallic art rather than circulating U.S. coinage.
Its selection gave the Mint an opportunity to transform another Weinman work into legal-tender coinage more than a century after its creation.
In 2018, the Mint expanded the palladium program beyond bullion by issuing the first collector version.
That coin had a proof finish.
Proof coinage is specially manufactured to emphasize detail and visual contrast. Dies and planchets receive additional preparation, and the resulting coins are intended for collectors rather than ordinary circulation.
The 2018 proof established a pattern that would make the palladium series unusual among American Eagles: collector finishes could change from year to year.
The following year, the Mint changed the finish again.
The 2019 Palladium Eagle was issued in reverse proof.
Traditional proof coins generally use mirrorlike fields and frosted design elements. Reverse proofs invert that visual relationship, giving the fields a frosted appearance while selected raised elements appear brilliant or reflective.
By the end of 2019, collectors had seen the same Weinman-based palladium design in bullion, proof, and reverse-proof form.
One major collector finish remained.
The Mint announced on September 17, 2020, that the American Eagle One Ounce Palladium Uncirculated Coin would go on sale one week later.
Orders opened at noon EDT on September 24.
The product code was 20EK.
The Mint set both the mintage limit and product limit at 10,000 units.
It was the first uncirculated-finish collector coin in the palladium series.
What “Uncirculated” Means Here
The term can be confusing because collectors use “uncirculated” in more than one way.
An ordinary business-strike coin that never entered circulation may be described as uncirculated because it shows no wear.
But the 2020 Palladium Eagle was a specific Mint collector product with an intentionally manufactured uncirculated finish.
It was not simply a 2017-style bullion coin that happened to remain unused.
The Mint struck it specifically as a numismatic issue at West Point.
The 2020 American Palladium Eagle contained one troy ounce of palladium and was 99.95 percent pure.
Its diameter was approximately 34.03 millimeters, or 1.340 inches.
The edge was reeded.
The coin carried a $25 denomination and the W mint mark of West Point.
Its reverse inscriptions included UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, $25, 1 OZ. Pd .9995 FINE, and E PLURIBUS UNUM.
The chemical symbol Pd identifies palladium.
As with other precious-metal bullion and collector coins, the face value is not intended to track the metal’s market price.
The coin is legal tender for $25, but one ounce of palladium has generally represented a much greater commodity value.
The Mint therefore priced the collector issue under its precious-metal pricing system rather than near face value.
That distinction is fundamental to understanding modern American Eagles: their legal-tender denomination authenticates them as United States coins, while their economic value is driven by precious-metal content, collector demand, rarity, condition, and market conditions.
West Point and Modern Precious-Metal Coinage
The West Point Mint has become one of the most important facilities for modern American precious-metal coins.
Located in New York, it began as a bullion depository and later became an official branch of the United States Mint.
West Point has struck numerous American Eagle bullion and collector coins in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
The W mint mark on the 2020 uncirculated Palladium Eagle identifies the facility where this limited collector issue was made.
The Mint explicitly noted that finishes on collector coins in the palladium program could alternate from year to year.
That approach created a series with a built-in visual rhythm.
Collectors were not simply buying the same proof treatment annually. They could compare how the same high-relief Weinman designs appeared under dramatically different surface treatments.
The pattern became clear: proof in 2018, reverse proof in 2019, uncirculated in 2020, and proof again in 2021.
Reverse proof returned in 2022, and uncirculated returned in 2023.
The changing finishes also demonstrate how much a coin’s surfaces affect the way its design is perceived. A proof emphasizes contrast between reflective fields and frosted devices. A reverse proof reverses that relationship. An uncirculated collector finish presents the same sculptural forms with a more uniform appearance.
That matters particularly for the Palladium Eagle because Weinman’s artwork was selected partly for its sculptural strength. Collectors could compare Liberty’s winged cap, facial modeling, the eagle, and the rock across several deliberately different presentations without changing the underlying design.
In effect, the first four years turned the series into a small study of modern Mint finishing techniques.
The Palladium Eagle was also notable for its use of high-relief design treatment.
Weinman’s Winged Liberty had originally been compressed into the small dimensions of a dime. On the palladium coin, the portrait is enlarged and modeled with greater sculptural presence.
The eagle reverse likewise benefits from the larger format.
The result connects two very different eras of Mint production: early twentieth-century Beaux-Arts-inspired sculpture and twenty-first-century precious-metal coin manufacturing.
A Small Mintage in a Modern Program
A maximum of 10,000 coins made the 2020 uncirculated Palladium Eagle a deliberately limited product.
That number is tiny compared with circulating coin production, where annual mintages can reach hundreds of millions or billions.
Even within modern numismatics, 10,000 pieces is a relatively constrained population.
The limited production reflected the specialized nature of palladium collecting and the high intrinsic value of each coin.
Gold and silver have centuries of American monetary history behind them. Palladium does not. That gives the Palladium Eagle a different identity from programs that consciously continue old circulating-coin traditions.
The metal is modern in its American numismatic context, while the artwork is deliberately historical. The coin therefore combines a twenty-first-century precious-metal market with designs created more than a century earlier.
That contrast is part of what distinguishes the series from the Gold and Silver Eagles, whose historical design references developed along different paths.
The American Palladium Eagle performs an interesting historical function.
It is simultaneously a modern precious-metal coin and a vehicle for preserving earlier American medallic art.
The obverse makes the Mercury dime’s Liberty portrait available in a much larger format. The reverse transforms Weinman’s 1907 architectural medal design into a federal coin.
Rather than merely imitating an old coin, the Palladium Eagle creates a new composition from two authentic Weinman works.
From Pocket Dime to One-Ounce Palladium Coin
The scale change is one of the most striking aspects of the program. Weinman’s Winged Liberty was created for a ten-cent coin that measured less than eighteen millimeters across. The Palladium Eagle gives the portrait a substantially larger canvas.
That enlargement allows collectors to see the design less as a familiar “Mercury dime” emblem and more as a piece of sculpture. Features compressed by the dime’s tiny format gain space and presence.
It is a rare example of a classic circulating-coin design being officially reinterpreted in a different metal, denomination, scale, relief, and collector format while remaining recognizably faithful to the original artist.
The program’s opening sequence is unusually tidy:
2017 introduced the bullion coin.
2018 introduced the proof collector coin.
2019 introduced reverse proof.
2020 introduced uncirculated.
By September 24, 2020, the Mint had shown collectors four distinct presentations of the Palladium Eagle concept in four consecutive years.
That is what makes the date a genuine program milestone rather than merely another annual product sale.
The alternating-finish concept survived beyond 2020.
Proof returned in 2021, reverse proof in 2022, and uncirculated in 2023. The Mint returned to proof again in 2024.
The continuing sequence demonstrates that the 2020 release was not an isolated experiment. Uncirculated became one of the recurring collector formats for the Palladium Eagle.
September 24, 2020 marks the day the American Palladium Eagle reached another stage in its rapid evolution.
Only three years after the first bullion coin appeared, collectors could obtain the Weinman-based design in its first official uncirculated collector finish.
The coin combined one ounce of .9995 fine palladium, a low 10,000-piece limit, West Point production, and two designs with roots in the golden age of American coin artistry.
For a metal with almost no place in historic U.S. circulating coinage, palladium had quickly acquired a distinctive federal series of its own.
September 24 completed the initial sequence: bullion, proof, reverse proof, and uncirculated.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
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