The Story Behind America’s First State-Issued Gold and Silver Coin Series

Coins are supposed to come from countries. No one told Texas. 

For the first time in American history, a U.S. state has issued its own official gold and silver coin series — not a one-off commemorative, but an ongoing annual program built the same way the world's great national mints have built theirs for generations. It's called the State of Texas Commemorative Series, known simply as the Lone Stars, and it's issued through the Texas Bullion Depository, the nation's only state-run precious metals facility. 

The 2026 release includes three coins: a 1 oz gold, a ½ oz gold, and a 1 oz silver Lone Star, each carrying an original design from Joel Iskowitz, a numismatic artist whose six-decade career shaped coinage for governments around the world, and whose design for this release is among the last of his life's work. 

It's a first that belongs to Texas alone. And like most things Texas builds, it didn't happen by accident.  

Texas has a habit of building things no other state has bothered to build. 

When the rest of the country plugged into shared power grids, Texas built its own. When investors wanted a place to store gold and silver without routing it through vaults in New York or London, Texas built that too, standing up the Texas Bullion Depository as the nation's first state-run precious metals facility. Independence isn't just a chapter in Texas history — it's a habit the state has never quite broken. 

So maybe it shouldn't be surprising that when it came time to ask who would be the first U.S. state to issue its own official gold and silver coin series, the answer was Texas. 

For as long as coins have carried a nation’s story, that story belonged to nations alone. 

The U.S. Mint introduced the American Eagle to the world. The Royal Canadian Mint answered with the Maple Leaf. South Africa struck the Krugerrand, and Austria its Philharmonic. These programs weren’t built in a single year, and they weren’t remembered for a single design. They became legendary because they returned, year after year, decade after decade — each new release adding another layer to an identity generations in the making.  

A coin from a program like that isn’t just a piece of gold or silver. It’s a fragment of an ongoing story, one link in a chain that stretches back before the collector holding it was born. 

No state government had ever attempted to build something like that. Texas did. 

Known simply as Lone Stars — they are the first official commemorative gold and silver coin series ever issued by a U.S. state.  

Every great series has a moment when its vision first comes into full focus. For the Lone Stars, that moment is 2026. 

The collection includes three coins: a 1 oz gold, a ½ oz gold, and a 1 oz silver Lone Star. Each carries a single design, created exclusively for this release, by legendary numismatic artist Joel Iskowitz. 

The design he left behind, among his last, tells a distinctly Texas story on both faces. 

On the obverse, Lady Liberty sits beside the Texas State Capitol, holding the Lone Star aloft above its dome. The image draws directly from the Capitol’s own crowning statue — the Goddess of Liberty, standing watch over Austin since the 1880s — reimagined here as a living figure rather than a distant monument. It’s a composition about guidance as much as freedom: liberty not as an abstract idea, but as something held up, protected, carried forward. 

On the reverse, the Official Coat of Arms of Texas rests inside a frame of live oak and olive branches — old symbols of strength and peace, chosen with the same care as everything else in this design. Around the edge, the words “THE STATE OF TEXAS” sit alongside “FRIENDSHIP,” the English translation of Tejas, the word the earliest inhabitants of the region used long before there was a Texas to name. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind that rewards a closer look: a 500-year-old word for friendship, struck into a coin issued for the very first time in 2026. 

Together, the obverse and reverse create a design that feels complete in its own right while leaving room for what comes next. Because this design isn’t meant to be the only chapter – it’s meant to be the first.  

Texas has never lacked for coins and rounds that borrow its imagery. Its flag, its stars, its outsized sense of identity — private mints have been striking Texas-themed rounds for years, and plenty of them are beautifully made. 

The Lone Stars are something else entirely. 

They aren’t simply inspired by Texas. They’re issued by Texas.  

That distinction is the whole point. This isn’t a private company’s tribute to a state it admires from the outside — it’s an official product of the Texas Bullion Depository, a state agency, born from the same instinct for building things Texas felt it couldn’t get anywhere else. The same instinct that led the state to build its own depository in the first place, rather than trust that job to someone else, is the instinct behind this coin. Where other states have only ever admired that kind of institution-building from a distance, Texas keeps doing it. 

The significance of the Lone Stars was never going to be about any single year’s release. It’s about what the series becomes over time. 

Like the American Eagle before it, and the Maple Leaf, and every enduring national coin program that’s earned its place in collections around the world, the Lone Stars were designed to be written over decades, not admired for a season. Each annual release is meant to be another chapter — a new design, a new perspective, another piece of Texas struck into gold and silver and handed down the same way a family passes down a story. 

Years from now, new Lone Star releases will carry new artwork and tell new stories. But every one of them will trace back to the same beginning: the moment the Texas Bullion Depository, through the State of Texas’ authorization, did what no state institution in America had ever done before, and gave Texas a coin series to call entirely its own.