How long have you been working on perfecting the process of minting coins in rhodium, and how does minting coins in rhodium differ from other metals?

We've been working on this for over a year now, its cost us a lot of money as well as time. The work involved in getting this project off the ground has been tremendous, easily the biggest thing our company has ever done. This is really an historic moment, where a truly unique precious metal product comes onto the market, and we're just excited to be the ones to have pioneered it.

Making coins out of Rhodium has got to be as different from making other kinds of coins as can be. Normally, making coins is a very straightforward process. You roll an ingot out into a sheet, punch blank disks, and then stamp the disks with the design to make coins. This process works with just about any metal you can think of, copper, silver, gold, platinum, palladium, etc. You try and do that with Rhodium and you'll end up with a bunch of broken flakes and powder. Rhodium has uncommon properties that make it extremely hard, brittle and down right stubborn, features that do not lend themselves to making coins easily.

The way we had to approach it was to come up with a completely new method, a method that was developed through trial and error, through extensive research, and through our own testing here at our facility. After nearly giving up a dozen times, we reached a "eureka" moment a couple of weeks ago, when we realised that we finally cracked the code, and would be able to set up full scale production. Boy, was that exciting.