COTY 2023 Award Winners Announced

The Coin of the Year (COTY) Awards have been held every year since 1984, with a panel of judges nominating ten coins in each of the ten award categories. From there, another panel of international judges reviews the nominees and select the category winners.

The winners of the 40th edition of the annual COTY Awards were announced at the 2023 World’s Fair of Money, held in Pittsburgh earlier this month. This year’s awards ceremony was the first held in-person following a three-year hiatus due to the COVID pandemic.

The Austrian Mint scooped the top prize of Coin of the Year with its €20 silver coin titled ‘The Black Hole’. The coin is concave on one side and convex on the other, with the black hole vortex phenomenon illustrated on the reverse through a funnel shape decorated with a colour-printed spiral. ‘Schwarzes Loch’ is inscribed at the top of the reverse design, German for ‘Black Hole’.

On the obverse, a cone rises from the flat silver surface, representing the curvature of space-time. Several words are inscribed around the coin, with ‘Cygnus X-1’, the first black hole to be named as such and ‘15 M’, the solar mass of that black hole, on the right side of the coin.

‘SINGULARITAT’ (‘Singularity’) and ‘EREIGNISHORIZONT’ (‘Event Horizon’) are inscribed at the top and bottom of the coin, respectively. The former points to the location of maximum space-time curvature whilst the latter marks the boundary between the observable and the unobservable in space-time.

Despite receiving 60% more votes than its closest competitor in its winning category of ‘Best Silver Coin’, the voting for the top award was much tighter, with the coin securing the overall COTY category win by a single vote – according to COTY co-ordinator Tom Michael.

The winners of each category are as follows:

• Most Historically Significant Coin: Monnaie de Paris, – silver €10, ‘Pasteur’

• Best Contemporary Event Coin: The Royal Mint, – cupro-nickel and colour printing 50p, ‘50 Years of Pride’

• Best Gold Coin: South African Mint – gold R50, ‘The Lion, Big 5 II’

• Best Silver Coin: Austrian Mint – silver €20, ‘The Black Hole’

• Best Crown Coin: Bank of Greece – silver €10, ‘The Antikythera Mechanism’

• Best Circulating Coin: Royal Australian Mint – aluminium bronze $2, ‘Honey Bee’

• Best Bimetallic Coin: Austrian Mint – silver niobium €25, ‘Extraterrestrial Life’

• Most Artistic Coin: Royal Australian Mint – silver $5, ‘Beauty, Rich and Rare – Great Barrier Reef’

• Most Innovative Coin: Royal Canadian Mint – silver $50, ‘Canadian Ghost Ship’

• Most Inspirational Coin: National Bank of Ukraine – silver 10 hryvnia, ‘In Unity, Strength’.

More information about each of the coins can be found on Numismatic News – www.numismaticnews.net/world-coins/coin-of-the-year-champions-a-gallery.