Coiniverse

Let’s go back to the late 2010s. At that time, the idea was in the air: why not make a catalogue of modern coins available on the internet? Some hoped that this would attract new, international, young customer groups, while others wanted to revitalise the secondary market for contemporary coins.

Coiniverse: Technology, technology, technology

As a mint, the Mint of Finland was actually only interested in the former. It wanted to provide all other European mints with a common marketplace on the Coiniverse app and thus exploit synergy effects. After all, anyone who buys Austrian coins is likely to be interested in coins from Slovakia or Croatia. The secondary market? Not interesting for mints. They don’t earn anything from it, and most of them still don’t understand that most collectors only buy commemorative coins because they hope to sell them again at a fair price at some point.
In 2016, the Mint of Finland began developing its innovative collector app. No expense was spared on the technical team, which brought together an elite group of Finnish IT developers. Numismatists? Conspicuous by their absence. The concept? Rather unrealistic. The idea was to cover the immense development costs through very high contributions from mints that would offer their new coins on Coiniverse. Several large mints supported the project from the outset, mainly because of the trust they had in the Mint of Finland.
Collectors would be able to catalogue their coins on the Coiniverse app and add them to collections. The developers boasted about their state-of-the-art technology. A quick photo of the coin with a smartphone and the app would identify it and display the catalogue entry.
And that brings us to the problem. The catalogue worked – for a tiny fraction of all coins. Because while the technology was top notch, the catalogue was not.
Here, the Mint of Finland relied on a mixture of cheaply purchased data sets and the wiki principle. The wiki principle is based on the idea that even users without administrator rights can upload and edit catalogue entries. The idea was to build a catalogue at no cost by harnessing the power of swarm intelligence. The Mint of Finland considered it unnecessary to purchase expensive image rights or collect the images themselves. Coiniverse users would create them themselves and make them available.
What sounded good in theory was unsuitable in practice. Very few collectors know how to catalogue correctly and that most images on the internet are copyrighted.

Numismatics? Who needs that?

Remember the early days of Wikipedia? Back then, most articles were so bad that you could only warn people not to use them. Today, Wikipedia has a small army of volunteer (and often highly educated) administrators. They review every change before approving it. Perfect quality control! Coiniverse never got that far.
It lacked the sensitivity to realise that a numismatic catalogue requires a certain amount of prior knowledge. This is exactly what many wiki catalogue entries looked like after the app was launched in January 2021. Nevertheless, the project took off – if you believe Coiniverse’s PR. By 2022, there was already talk of 100,000 catalogue entries. New mints were attracted with a huge increase in users. However, this figure was not particularly meaningful: anyone who wanted to take a look at Coiniverse had to download the app. Whether they actually used it afterwards is another matter. After all, there are better alternatives online, such as the exemplary Numista or Cosmos of Collectibles.

The end of the Mint of Finland, the beginning of the end for Coiniverse

The Mint of Finland had completely different problems at that time. Its Coiniverse was also an attempt to participate in the booming collectors’ market, as the production of circulation coins – the Mint of Finland’s core business – was stagnating. Corona in spring 2020 was a disaster for the Mint of Finland: cash consumption fell dramatically and the deficit rose. In 2020, the Mint of Finland made a loss of 5.1 million euros. This was almost four times the loss in 2019, when the decline in cash use began to emerge. In 2022, losses totalled 9.9 million. This was too much for the Finnish state. It sought a buyer for the loss-making company. None was found, and the conglomerate was sold off in parts. Coiniverse was positioned on the market as an independent start-up in August 2023; round blank production was sold on 31 December 2023; and the Mint of Finland closed in 2025.

The last ones are the ones who get bitten

Since then, the new management has burned through hundreds of thousands of euros in investor funds to get their app back on track. In April 2024 alone, the British investment fund ACF Investors contributed $225,000. How much the other investment fund, VNTRS, contributed is unknown. It is unlikely to have been much less.
But despite these huge sums, Coiniverse failed to get off the ground. No wonder! The app was there, but so much was missing, including a deep knowledge of the collectors’ market, which would have allowed a viable business model to be implemented.
The bottom line: technology is important. Many good ideas from experts in the numismatic market fail because they cannot estimate how complex the technology will be that they need to implement their ideas. But just as important is knowledge of the market for which an application is being created. Now, coin mints are usually only known to those who buy new coins. They believe that this means they know the collectors’ market, but there is much more to it than that. Collectors don’t just buy, they collect, trade, sell, research, exchange ideas and much more.
All in all, it has to be said: what a shame! Coiniverse could have filled a gap. And there are many gaps. For example, there is still no specialised platform for C2C trading in modern coins. This would not only have addressed the secondary market problem, but also could have been a source of income.
Well, what’s the point in complaining? Coiniverse is history. What mints learn from history is up to the future.

Text and images: Ursula Kampmann