Rare $4 Gold Coin May Be Worth $1.5 Million

A rare $4 gold coin will be hitting the auction block this month and it could be sold for, well, a lot more than $4.

Paul Song, the director of rare coins for Bonhams Auction House, said that the coin could bring in $1.5 million.

Song said that the $4 Coiled Hair Stella gold coin from 1880 contains six grams of pure gold and was never released to the public. The coin will be sold along with 26 other coins. The entire collection is worth about $8 million.

Song said: “That’s an average lot value of almost $300,000 per coin. That may not be a Monet painting but in my world, that’s pretty amazing. It’s been a privilege to handle them, and they are gorgeous, just because they’re gold, perfectly struck and the designs are really incredible.”

Reuters reports that the rare $4 gold coin is considered one of the “white whales” of coin collecting.

Song said the coiled Hair Stella gold coin was designed to match the weight of foreign money from countries like France, Belgium and Switzerland. The idea was to make it easier for intercountry trading but the coin never received public support.

Song added: “At the end of the day, there was just not enough public support for it, and it became a political issue so it was basically a scrap heap of history, which also is what makes it so rare today. The 1880 $4 Coiled Hair Stella is one of the so-called white whales of the coin collecting world. They are so rare, they come on the market maybe once or twice, at most, every decade…That particular coin, there’s only 10 or 12 now, and most of these are in public institutions or private collections.”