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Buy the 2021 1 oz Tokelau Equilibrium Silver BU — 4th release in Pressburg Mint's acclaimed Equilibrium Series
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|---|---|---|---|
| 1 - 14 | $75.49 | $78.66 | $79.64 |
| 15 or more | $74.84 | $77.98 | $78.96 |
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The 2021 1 oz Tokelau Equilibrium Silver Coin (BU) is the fourth annual release in Pressburg Mint's Equilibrium Series, an annual silver bullion program that has earned a dedicated global collector following since its 2018 debut, distinguished by its consistent philosophical theme, its exceptional design quality, and its accessible 1 oz format at a modest premium over spot.
Struck in one troy ounce of .9999 fine silver, four-nines purity, equivalent to Canadian Maple Leaf and Australian Kangaroo standards, this coin is issued as official legal tender by Tokelau, a Pacific territory of New Zealand, with a face value of $5 NZD. Sovereign backing confirms the coin's legitimacy as a recognised financial instrument.
With a worldwide mintage of 30,000 coins, the BU version of the 2021 Equilibrium is among the more accessible premium bullion coins from Pressburg Mint, while still significantly limited compared to mainstream sovereign bullion programs like the Britannia or Maple Leaf.
Note for buyers: The 2021 Equilibrium was also released in a Proof-Like format with a mintage of just 999 coins and two embedded Swarovski crystals on the reverse. The Proof-Like version is a distinct product from this BU listing. BOLD carries both formats, see our Tokelau Equilibrium collection for the Proof-Like version.
The Pressburg Mint (Bratislavská mincovňa) is a modern private mint headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia, but its roots in the city's minting tradition extend back to 1430, when Bratislava (then known as Pressburg under the Habsburg Empire) received the formal right of coinage and began producing silver coins for the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary.
Over the centuries, the Bratislava mint became one of Central Europe's most important minting centres, producing the silver foliars and dinars that circulated across the Habsburg domains. The mint continued through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was absorbed by the Czech State Mint in the twentieth century, and went dormant when Czechoslovakia divided in 1993.
In 2015, the Pressburg Mint was revived as a privately owned company, committed to continuing the city's 600-year minting tradition while applying modern technology and artistic innovation. It entered the collectible coin market immediately with its Chronos series, followed by the Equilibrium, Terra, and Vivat Humanitas programs.
The Equilibrium coin was historically significant beyond being a new series: it was the first silver investment coin struck in Bratislava since the era of the old toliars and dinars, the revival of a tradition dormant for over two centuries.
Key Pressburg Mint credentials: ISO-standard production across four facilities, 40+ employees, a global customer base, recognition as one of Slovakia's fastest-growing companies (FinStat 2025), and two genuine firsts, the first mint to use 3D printing technology for coin production, and the first mint to release a coin designed by Artificial Intelligence (the AI Coin, June 2023).
The Equilibrium Series launched in 2018 as a private round series, exploring the concept of balance through the lens of traditional Chinese philosophy. In 2019, the series was elevated: coins began to be issued under the authority of Tokelau as legal tender, with Queen Elizabeth II's effigy added to the obverse and face values assigned in New Zealand Dollars.
As Pressburg Mint states in their series manifesto: "Tokelau's Equilibrium coin series pays tribute to a core principle of traditional Chinese thought. It's the principle of action and reaction, the power of action and reception that is called the Yang and Yin, a complementary dynamic that stands at the heart of Chinese cosmology and philosophy, a fruitful paradox that allows the universe to self-create from the raw material of qi or chi."
| Year | Mintage | Design Focus | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Limited | Inaugural yin-yang / equilibrium concept | Closed |
| 2019 | 30,000 | Balance — first legal tender issue | Closed |
| 2020 | 30,000 | Equilibrium / yin-yang evolution | Closed |
| 2021 | 30,000 | Yin-yang with wave pattern (this coin) | Available |
| 2022 | 30,000 (BU) / 999 (PL) | Taijitu / yin-yang Proof-Like | Available |
The 2021 BU represents the fourth annual legal tender issue and one of the most visually cohesive releases in the series — where every design element, on both faces, contributes to the equilibrium theme.
The obverse carries the Ian Rank-Broadley portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the same portrait used across Tokelau's legal tender coinage and immediately recognisable to collectors of Commonwealth bullion worldwide.
Created by British sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley and first adopted on British coins in 1998, this is the fourth of five official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II produced for Commonwealth coinage during her reign. Rank-Broadley's initials (IRB) appear beneath the portrait's neck truncation. Queen Elizabeth II is depicted in right-profile relief wearing a tiara.
What makes the Pressburg Mint Tokelau obverse distinctive is not the portrait alone, it is the extraordinary surrounding field design. Rather than the plain, unadorned background of most bullion coin obverses, the 2021 Equilibrium obverse features an oscillating wave pattern filling the background field entirely, repeating sine-wave curves that create a visual impression of motion and rhythm across the silver surface.
This is not a decorative fill. Waves are the physical world's most perfect expression of equilibrium in motion, the oscillation of energy between two opposing states, crest and trough, compression and rarefaction. The wave neither accumulates in one place nor disappears into the other; it flows between. In placing the Queen's portrait against a field of waves, Pressburg Mint sets the symbol of British sovereign authority within the visual language of the series' core philosophical theme.
A stylised intersecting dotted line border encircles the entire rim, the same border appearing on both faces, providing visual continuity that connects obverse and reverse into a unified design statement.
Obverse inscriptions: "ELIZABETH II . TOKELAU . 2021 . 5 DOLLARS."
The reverse is the coin's philosophical centrepiece, delivering the yin-yang symbol, known in Chinese as the taijitu (太極圖, literally "diagram of the supreme ultimate"), in a form that goes substantially beyond a simple reproduction of the classical symbol.
The primary taijitu fills the central field, a large, stylised version of the classic yin-yang circle redesigned with the same oscillating wave aesthetic used in the obverse background. The dividing line between the yin and yang halves is rendered as a flowing wave curve rather than the standard S-curve, reinforcing the connection between the coin's two faces and embedding the wave-equilibrium motif into the symbol itself.
Two secondary taijitu, smaller in scale, flank the primary symbol, one on each side. This triadic arrangement carries a meaningful compositional statement: equilibrium is not a single, isolated phenomenon but a pattern that recurs across scales, from the cosmic to the personal. The presence of two satellite symbols echoes the Chinese philosophical understanding that yin-yang dynamics govern processes at every level of existence simultaneously.
The same stylised border that encircles the obverse encircles the reverse, completing the visual unity of both faces of the coin.
Reverse inscriptions: "EQUILIBRIUM . 1 oz FINE SILVER 9999."
To fully appreciate what Pressburg Mint accomplished with the Equilibrium Series, it helps to understand the philosophical tradition from which the taijitu emerges.
The concepts of yin and yang are among the most ancient in Chinese intellectual history. Their first clear formulation appears in the Yijing (I Ching, or Book of Changes), a text compiled during the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BCE), in the sentence: "A succession of yin and yang is called the Tao."
Britannica describes yin and yang as "two complementary, interdependent phases alternating in space and time; emblems evoking the harmonious interplay of all pairs of opposites in the cosmos." The Taoist treatise Huainanzi describes how a single Primordial Breath split into two: the light, ethereal yang breath that formed heaven, and the heavier, denser yin breath that formed earth. Everything in the universe, fire and water, light and shadow, expansion and contraction, activity and rest, emerged from the interaction of these two primary forces.
Yin (the dark half of the taijitu) represents earth, shadow, female energy, passivity, reception, contraction, darkness, the moon, stillness, water, and cold. Yang (the light half) represents heaven, light, male energy, activity, assertion, expansion, brightness, the sun, movement, fire, and warmth.
The taijitu's most profound insight, however, is not in the separation of these forces, it is in their interdependence and inevitable interpenetration. The small dark circle within the white half shows that within the apex of yang, yin is already present. The small light circle within the dark half shows that within the depths of yin, yang already stirs. The flowing curved boundary shows that the transition is never abrupt, never absolute, always a gradient, always a process.
As Britannica notes: "No quality is independent of its opposite, nor so pure that it does not contain its opposite in a diminished form." The symbol itself, circular, continuous, with no beginning and no end, represents the Taoist concept of the Tao as an infinite, self-sustaining cosmic process.
The 2021 Equilibrium coin takes this ancient philosophical framework and renders it in a medium that carries its own symbolic resonance: silver, extracted from the earth (yin), shaped by fire and pressure (yang), carrying an image of both cosmic balance and terrestrial sovereignty on its two faces. The wave-pattern rendering of the taijitu is Pressburg Mint's design statement: equilibrium is not a static condition but a dynamic process. The waves in the background field are in equilibrium in continuous motion, just as the Tao flows without stopping.
The coins of the Equilibrium Series are issued under the authority of Tokelau, a detail that deserves its own explanation, because Tokelau is one of the most extraordinary issuing authorities in the numismatic world.
Tokelau is a non-self-governing territory of New Zealand located in the South Pacific Ocean, approximately 500 kilometres north of Samoa. It consists of three low-lying coral atolls, Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo, with a combined land area of just 12 square kilometres and a population of approximately 1,499 people, making it the fourth-smallest nation or dependency in the world by population.
Tokelau holds several remarkable distinctions. It is the world's first fully solar-powered nation, all three atolls run entirely on photovoltaic solar energy, funded by New Zealand. It has the smallest economy of any nation or territory in the world, with no airport (accessible only by boat, taking 24 hours from Samoa). Per Australia's DFAT country brief, coin sales are one of Tokelau's key sources of income, alongside copra, postage stamps, and remittances from New Zealand. Furthermore, the seat of Tokelau's national council cycles between the three atolls every year, a rotating capital found nowhere else in the world. All Tokelauans are New Zealand citizens with the right to live in New Zealand.
The $5 face value on this coin is denominated in New Zealand Dollars, backed by the Tokelau government through its partnership with New Zealand. For collectors, Tokelau's partnership with Pressburg Mint has produced one of the most creative and philosophically coherent coin programs in modern numismatics, a collaboration between a Pacific microterritory and a Slovakian mint with a 600-year minting tradition.
One troy ounce of .9999 fine silver, four-nines purity, the highest standard for silver bullion, equivalent to Canadian Maple Leaf and Australian Kangaroo. Tokelau sovereign legal tender ($5 NZD) provides government backing that supports global liquidity. IRA eligible: the BU version meets IRS requirements for a Precious Metals IRA, .9999 fine silver, issued as sovereign legal tender. Note: the Proof-Like version with Swarovski crystals is a numismatic collectible and may not qualify. The 30,000 mintage is limited but accessible, substantially more available than the 999-mintage Proof-Like version.
Part of an ongoing annual series with strong design continuity, series completionists need each annual release. The 2021 BU is the only version of the 2021 Equilibrium design without Swarovski crystals, allowing the wave pattern and taijitu to dominate without embedded gemstones. The oscillating wave background is the most visually complex BU coin field in the Equilibrium series to date. Furthermore, the 2021 design achieves the most cohesive integration of the wave and equilibrium theme across both faces of any release in the series.
The yin-yang symbol is among the world's most universally recognised philosophical symbols, this coin communicates its theme to virtually any buyer regardless of their background in Chinese philosophy. The coin's visual complexity rewards examination: what appears at first as a simple yin-yang coin reveals multiple design layers on closer look. Makes a meaningful gift for practitioners of Taoism, tai chi, qigong, feng shui, traditional Chinese medicine, or anyone who values the philosophy of balance.
BOLD Precious Metals is an authorized dealer of Pressburg Mint and Tokelau collectibles, affiliated with PCGS, NGC, and BBB-accredited with a 99.8%+ positive feedback rating. We carry the complete Tokelau Equilibrium Series in both BU and Proof-Like formats, as well as Pressburg Mint's Chronos, Terra, Vivat Humanitas, and Icon series.
Individual coins arrive in protective plastic capsules. Free, fully insured domestic shipping on all orders of $199 or more.
📧 support@boldpreciousmetals.com 📞 1(866) 454-BOLD
The 2021 1 oz Tokelau Equilibrium Silver Coin (BU) is the fourth annual release in Pressburg Mint's Equilibrium Series, an annual silver bullion program that has earned a dedicated global collector following since its 2018 debut, distinguished by its consistent philosophical theme, its exceptional design quality, and its accessible 1 oz format at a modest premium over spot.
Struck in one troy ounce of .9999 fine silver, four-nines purity, equivalent to Canadian Maple Leaf and Australian Kangaroo standards, this coin is issued as official legal tender by Tokelau, a Pacific territory of New Zealand, with a face value of $5 NZD. Sovereign backing confirms the coin's legitimacy as a recognised financial instrument.
With a worldwide mintage of 30,000 coins, the BU version of the 2021 Equilibrium is among the more accessible premium bullion coins from Pressburg Mint, while still significantly limited compared to mainstream sovereign bullion programs like the Britannia or Maple Leaf.
Note for buyers: The 2021 Equilibrium was also released in a Proof-Like format with a mintage of just 999 coins and two embedded Swarovski crystals on the reverse. The Proof-Like version is a distinct product from this BU listing. BOLD carries both formats, see our Tokelau Equilibrium collection for the Proof-Like version.
The Pressburg Mint (Bratislavská mincovňa) is a modern private mint headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia, but its roots in the city's minting tradition extend back to 1430, when Bratislava (then known as Pressburg under the Habsburg Empire) received the formal right of coinage and began producing silver coins for the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary.
Over the centuries, the Bratislava mint became one of Central Europe's most important minting centres, producing the silver foliars and dinars that circulated across the Habsburg domains. The mint continued through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was absorbed by the Czech State Mint in the twentieth century, and went dormant when Czechoslovakia divided in 1993.
In 2015, the Pressburg Mint was revived as a privately owned company, committed to continuing the city's 600-year minting tradition while applying modern technology and artistic innovation. It entered the collectible coin market immediately with its Chronos series, followed by the Equilibrium, Terra, and Vivat Humanitas programs.
The Equilibrium coin was historically significant beyond being a new series: it was the first silver investment coin struck in Bratislava since the era of the old toliars and dinars, the revival of a tradition dormant for over two centuries.
Key Pressburg Mint credentials: ISO-standard production across four facilities, 40+ employees, a global customer base, recognition as one of Slovakia's fastest-growing companies (FinStat 2025), and two genuine firsts, the first mint to use 3D printing technology for coin production, and the first mint to release a coin designed by Artificial Intelligence (the AI Coin, June 2023).
The Equilibrium Series launched in 2018 as a private round series, exploring the concept of balance through the lens of traditional Chinese philosophy. In 2019, the series was elevated: coins began to be issued under the authority of Tokelau as legal tender, with Queen Elizabeth II's effigy added to the obverse and face values assigned in New Zealand Dollars.
As Pressburg Mint states in their series manifesto: "Tokelau's Equilibrium coin series pays tribute to a core principle of traditional Chinese thought. It's the principle of action and reaction, the power of action and reception that is called the Yang and Yin, a complementary dynamic that stands at the heart of Chinese cosmology and philosophy, a fruitful paradox that allows the universe to self-create from the raw material of qi or chi."
| Year | Mintage | Design Focus | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Limited | Inaugural yin-yang / equilibrium concept | Closed |
| 2019 | 30,000 | Balance — first legal tender issue | Closed |
| 2020 | 30,000 | Equilibrium / yin-yang evolution | Closed |
| 2021 | 30,000 | Yin-yang with wave pattern (this coin) | Available |
| 2022 | 30,000 (BU) / 999 (PL) | Taijitu / yin-yang Proof-Like | Available |
The 2021 BU represents the fourth annual legal tender issue and one of the most visually cohesive releases in the series — where every design element, on both faces, contributes to the equilibrium theme.
The obverse carries the Ian Rank-Broadley portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the same portrait used across Tokelau's legal tender coinage and immediately recognisable to collectors of Commonwealth bullion worldwide.
Created by British sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley and first adopted on British coins in 1998, this is the fourth of five official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II produced for Commonwealth coinage during her reign. Rank-Broadley's initials (IRB) appear beneath the portrait's neck truncation. Queen Elizabeth II is depicted in right-profile relief wearing a tiara.
What makes the Pressburg Mint Tokelau obverse distinctive is not the portrait alone, it is the extraordinary surrounding field design. Rather than the plain, unadorned background of most bullion coin obverses, the 2021 Equilibrium obverse features an oscillating wave pattern filling the background field entirely, repeating sine-wave curves that create a visual impression of motion and rhythm across the silver surface.
This is not a decorative fill. Waves are the physical world's most perfect expression of equilibrium in motion, the oscillation of energy between two opposing states, crest and trough, compression and rarefaction. The wave neither accumulates in one place nor disappears into the other; it flows between. In placing the Queen's portrait against a field of waves, Pressburg Mint sets the symbol of British sovereign authority within the visual language of the series' core philosophical theme.
A stylised intersecting dotted line border encircles the entire rim, the same border appearing on both faces, providing visual continuity that connects obverse and reverse into a unified design statement.
Obverse inscriptions: "ELIZABETH II . TOKELAU . 2021 . 5 DOLLARS."
The reverse is the coin's philosophical centrepiece, delivering the yin-yang symbol, known in Chinese as the taijitu (太極圖, literally "diagram of the supreme ultimate"), in a form that goes substantially beyond a simple reproduction of the classical symbol.
The primary taijitu fills the central field, a large, stylised version of the classic yin-yang circle redesigned with the same oscillating wave aesthetic used in the obverse background. The dividing line between the yin and yang halves is rendered as a flowing wave curve rather than the standard S-curve, reinforcing the connection between the coin's two faces and embedding the wave-equilibrium motif into the symbol itself.
Two secondary taijitu, smaller in scale, flank the primary symbol, one on each side. This triadic arrangement carries a meaningful compositional statement: equilibrium is not a single, isolated phenomenon but a pattern that recurs across scales, from the cosmic to the personal. The presence of two satellite symbols echoes the Chinese philosophical understanding that yin-yang dynamics govern processes at every level of existence simultaneously.
The same stylised border that encircles the obverse encircles the reverse, completing the visual unity of both faces of the coin.
Reverse inscriptions: "EQUILIBRIUM . 1 oz FINE SILVER 9999."
To fully appreciate what Pressburg Mint accomplished with the Equilibrium Series, it helps to understand the philosophical tradition from which the taijitu emerges.
The concepts of yin and yang are among the most ancient in Chinese intellectual history. Their first clear formulation appears in the Yijing (I Ching, or Book of Changes), a text compiled during the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BCE), in the sentence: "A succession of yin and yang is called the Tao."
Britannica describes yin and yang as "two complementary, interdependent phases alternating in space and time; emblems evoking the harmonious interplay of all pairs of opposites in the cosmos." The Taoist treatise Huainanzi describes how a single Primordial Breath split into two: the light, ethereal yang breath that formed heaven, and the heavier, denser yin breath that formed earth. Everything in the universe, fire and water, light and shadow, expansion and contraction, activity and rest, emerged from the interaction of these two primary forces.
Yin (the dark half of the taijitu) represents earth, shadow, female energy, passivity, reception, contraction, darkness, the moon, stillness, water, and cold. Yang (the light half) represents heaven, light, male energy, activity, assertion, expansion, brightness, the sun, movement, fire, and warmth.
The taijitu's most profound insight, however, is not in the separation of these forces, it is in their interdependence and inevitable interpenetration. The small dark circle within the white half shows that within the apex of yang, yin is already present. The small light circle within the dark half shows that within the depths of yin, yang already stirs. The flowing curved boundary shows that the transition is never abrupt, never absolute, always a gradient, always a process.
As Britannica notes: "No quality is independent of its opposite, nor so pure that it does not contain its opposite in a diminished form." The symbol itself, circular, continuous, with no beginning and no end, represents the Taoist concept of the Tao as an infinite, self-sustaining cosmic process.
The 2021 Equilibrium coin takes this ancient philosophical framework and renders it in a medium that carries its own symbolic resonance: silver, extracted from the earth (yin), shaped by fire and pressure (yang), carrying an image of both cosmic balance and terrestrial sovereignty on its two faces. The wave-pattern rendering of the taijitu is Pressburg Mint's design statement: equilibrium is not a static condition but a dynamic process. The waves in the background field are in equilibrium in continuous motion, just as the Tao flows without stopping.
The coins of the Equilibrium Series are issued under the authority of Tokelau, a detail that deserves its own explanation, because Tokelau is one of the most extraordinary issuing authorities in the numismatic world.
Tokelau is a non-self-governing territory of New Zealand located in the South Pacific Ocean, approximately 500 kilometres north of Samoa. It consists of three low-lying coral atolls, Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo, with a combined land area of just 12 square kilometres and a population of approximately 1,499 people, making it the fourth-smallest nation or dependency in the world by population.
Tokelau holds several remarkable distinctions. It is the world's first fully solar-powered nation, all three atolls run entirely on photovoltaic solar energy, funded by New Zealand. It has the smallest economy of any nation or territory in the world, with no airport (accessible only by boat, taking 24 hours from Samoa). Per Australia's DFAT country brief, coin sales are one of Tokelau's key sources of income, alongside copra, postage stamps, and remittances from New Zealand. Furthermore, the seat of Tokelau's national council cycles between the three atolls every year, a rotating capital found nowhere else in the world. All Tokelauans are New Zealand citizens with the right to live in New Zealand.
The $5 face value on this coin is denominated in New Zealand Dollars, backed by the Tokelau government through its partnership with New Zealand. For collectors, Tokelau's partnership with Pressburg Mint has produced one of the most creative and philosophically coherent coin programs in modern numismatics, a collaboration between a Pacific microterritory and a Slovakian mint with a 600-year minting tradition.
One troy ounce of .9999 fine silver, four-nines purity, the highest standard for silver bullion, equivalent to Canadian Maple Leaf and Australian Kangaroo. Tokelau sovereign legal tender ($5 NZD) provides government backing that supports global liquidity. IRA eligible: the BU version meets IRS requirements for a Precious Metals IRA, .9999 fine silver, issued as sovereign legal tender. Note: the Proof-Like version with Swarovski crystals is a numismatic collectible and may not qualify. The 30,000 mintage is limited but accessible, substantially more available than the 999-mintage Proof-Like version.
Part of an ongoing annual series with strong design continuity, series completionists need each annual release. The 2021 BU is the only version of the 2021 Equilibrium design without Swarovski crystals, allowing the wave pattern and taijitu to dominate without embedded gemstones. The oscillating wave background is the most visually complex BU coin field in the Equilibrium series to date. Furthermore, the 2021 design achieves the most cohesive integration of the wave and equilibrium theme across both faces of any release in the series.
The yin-yang symbol is among the world's most universally recognised philosophical symbols, this coin communicates its theme to virtually any buyer regardless of their background in Chinese philosophy. The coin's visual complexity rewards examination: what appears at first as a simple yin-yang coin reveals multiple design layers on closer look. Makes a meaningful gift for practitioners of Taoism, tai chi, qigong, feng shui, traditional Chinese medicine, or anyone who values the philosophy of balance.
BOLD Precious Metals is an authorized dealer of Pressburg Mint and Tokelau collectibles, affiliated with PCGS, NGC, and BBB-accredited with a 99.8%+ positive feedback rating. We carry the complete Tokelau Equilibrium Series in both BU and Proof-Like formats, as well as Pressburg Mint's Chronos, Terra, Vivat Humanitas, and Icon series.
Individual coins arrive in protective plastic capsules. Free, fully insured domestic shipping on all orders of $199 or more.
📧 support@boldpreciousmetals.com 📞 1(866) 454-BOLD
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