Philosophy

Restrike is built on a premise that is narrow: describe every gold coin to the same specification, so that two of them can be compared without first translating between a mint's brochure, a dealer's listing and a catalogue's shorthand.

The problem

Look up the same coin on three sites and you get three different documents. One gives the gross weight but not the fine gold. One says "22 carat" and never states the fineness. One quotes a price and never says which year or which mint. None of them agree on what a "type" is, or where the line between a type and an issue falls.

That is fine when you are reading about one coin. It falls apart the moment you want to answer a comparative question: which of these two carries more gold, what does a quarter-ounce of each cost at spot, which mints struck this design in 1925. Every one of those questions requires the same fields, filled in the same way, for both coins. So that is what the catalogue is: the same fields, filled in the same way.

The principles

One specification. A type is the unit of description. One design at one denomination and composition, one record: fine gold, fineness, gross weight, diameter, thickness, shape, orientation, both faces and the edge, catalogue references, and every issue by year, mint and finish. Two types are directly comparable field by field, with no translation step. Everything else on the site is downstream of this rule.

Numista's words. The vocabulary is Numista's (issuer, series, type, issue, mint) because it is the one the trade already shares. Every type filed there carries its N#, so a reader can check a record against the reference the trade uses. Numista's data is not copied here; the catalogue is authored from mint publications and the standard references.

Melt value, said as such. Every type page prints the fine gold in the coin at today's spot price, in the reader's display currency. It is stated as exactly that. It is not a valuation, it carries no numismatic premium, and it is not a price anyone is asking.

Reference data over opinion. The catalogue records facts about types, not judgements about individual physical coins: no valuations, no grading, no authentication, no provenance.

Open by design. A structured catalogue whose whole value is that its fields are consistent should not be locked behind a rendering of those fields. The catalogue is fully readable over a public API with no key and no account, every page of restrike.co is also served as markdown to any client that asks, and this documentation follows the same rule. If you want to compare two coins programmatically, you should not have to scrape a page to do it.

What Restrike is not

It is not a dealer: nothing here sells a coin, and no figure on the site is an offer. It is not a valuation service. It is not a grading or authentication service, and no data here can tell you whether a specific physical coin is genuine. And it is not a forum; there is no community layer and none is planned.

Contact

Corrections, additions and questions: hello@restrike.co. Catalogue corrections are the most useful thing you can send: say which type, which field, and what it should be.