The great white shark has been a recurring subject for the Royal Canadian Mint's fine silver program, which by 2018 had fully embraced rhodium plating as a contrast technique — the hard, platinum-group metal resists tarnish far better than silver alone and produces the sharp tonal separation the Mint's engravers were designing toward. Rhodium is, by spot price, typically more expensive than gold, which lends a certain irony to its use on a $30 face-value collector piece.
The great white shark has been a recurring subject for the Royal Canadian Mint's fine silver program, which by 2018 had fully embraced rhodium plating as a contrast technique — the hard, platinum-group metal resists tarnish far better than silver alone and produces the sharp tonal separation the Mint's engravers were designing toward. Rhodium is, by spot price, typically more expensive than gold, which lends a certain irony to its use on a $30 face-value collector piece.